ABSTRACT
Germany is now witnessing the fifth in a series of set-piece negotiations on the reform of the federal system since 1990. Like the other points in the series, it is unlikely that significant reform will follow. This persistent pattern of non-reform reflects in part the difficulty of disentangling a system based on high consensus requirements between federal and regional governments through negotiations based on similarly high consensus requirements. More fundamentally it reflects the power of a unitarist conception of federalism in Germany. This conception is periodically challenged, but has not yet been overcome, by ‘territorialising’ pressures from elites and citizens in some German Länder. These territorialising pressures appear persistent and are likely in due course to bring a further iteration – another ‘groundhog day’ – in the eternal German federalism reform debate.
