ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses the Federal Government recognises the Laender as privileged interests in relevant European Community (EC) policy-making areas. The term cooperative federalism only emerged comparatively recently in West Germany. Its emergence is related to the expansion of governmental legislation in a number of policy areas associated largely with new scientific-technological development. In each of the federal states there is a hierarchical structure parallel to that in the Federal Government. The importance of the Bund-Laender talks lay in the fact that the states had greater knowledge of the policy area. The Laender were in consequence rather concerned about losing further power to the Community level with such tenuous justification. Central to complete analysis of subnational governments participation in the EC policy has been the argument that expertise and decentralisation are the two most important characteristics. They are indeed the main properties of cooperative federalism, which has been seen to represent an important part of Laender participation in Community policy.
