ABSTRACT
For Germany and the German people, the twentieth century has been a succession of traumas: the war of 1914-1918; and the Weimar Republic, burdened by the reparations of the Treaty of Versailles. A distinctively German pattern of political democracy has fully taken shape in the Federal Republic, derived primarily from the Basic Law, conceived while what later became the original Federal Republic still consisted of the three Western zones of postwar Allied occupation. In Germany, unified and freed of the other constraints imposed by the Cold War, the political spectrum has widened, so as to tolerate greater scope both on the Right and the Left. Speculation concerning the evolution of German national self-identification begins with recognition of what Germans today do and do not carry with them from the past. The European Union evolved primarily from the core of the linkage between France and the Federal Republic of Germany that began in the 1950s.
