The Federal of Republic of Germany Is a Democratic and Social Federal
The Federal Republic of Germany Jutta Kramer The Federal Republic of Germany “is a democratic and social federal state” (Basic Law, Art. 20I). It was founded in 1949, after the Western Allies gave the prime ministers of the Länder (i.e., the constituent states), which were reestablished after the Second World War, the task of drafting a new constitution with a federal character in order to prevent a strong central state from arising in Germany again. However, the federal order in Germany does not follow the example of the United States Constitution, which emphasizes a division of powers between governments, but rather the German tradition, which is characterized by mutual connections, interconnections, and overlapping of the centralized and decentralized state units.1 When it was founded, the Federal Republic of Germany consisted of 11 Länder (without Berlin, which was a city-state under Allied control) that did not conform to the boundaries of the former Weimar Republic. Since reunification in 1990, Germany has consisted of 16 Länder, including three city-states: Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin. Germany’s population is spread across 357,000 square kilometres. The highest population density is in Berlin, which has 3,800 inhabitants per square kilometre; the lowest is in the Land Brandenburg, which has only 88 inhabitants per square kilometre. Länder sizes differ considerably as well. The smallest Land, Bremen, consisting of two cities (Bremen and Bremerhaven), has 680,000 inhabitants; the largest Land, North Rhine-Westphalia, has more than 17.9 million inhabitants. The ethnicity of Germany’s population of 82.1 million people is largely homogeneous.
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