Corporatism and ‘new groups’: Emerging value conflicts in contemporary Germany

Traditionally, Germany’s political system has been regarded as being based on consensus with regard to certain substantive values, in which the role of the state has primarily been conceived as establishing the legal framework and facilitating negotiations over hitherto intractable disputes among rival social parties (Katzestein 1987). It has been observed that ‘policies can be agreed and carried out only if at some stage an integrative solution is forthcoming [. . .]. The institutional structures provided in the Constitution, or Basic Law, amount to a set of “consensus inducing mechanisms”’ (Smith 1992: 29).