ABSTRACT
To use bold strokes and simple colours: Germany is an old federation and a young democracy. The German case proves that federalism does not necessarily accompany democracy. Federal structures and federalism have been the basic principles of recent German history.1 Their institutional design, however, was moulded in an environment of non-democratic regimes with a strong bureaucratic bias, and the subsequent merger with democratic politics did little to change their fundamental character. German federalism up to contemporary developments is marked by a path dependence which is rooted in a unitary executive federalism, with a strong desire of the political elites and the important social forces for national unity, uniformity of the legal order (Rechtsstaat) and an embedded political culture of output orientation towards social transfers (Sozialstaat).2 But during the last decade or so, a reform of the German federal system has taken place which has modified this picture. This chapter therefore will first give a short account of the constitutional development of the federal order and then it will look into the thesis of German federalism being only a “unitarianism in disguise”, concluding with a short report and brief assessment of the most recent reforms which took effect in autumn 2006.
