This book breaks new intellectual ground in the analysis of the German welfare state. Bleses and Seeleib-Kaiser argue that we are witnessing a dual transformation of the welfare state, which is caused by the emergence of new dominating interpretative patterns. Increasingly, the state reduces its social policy commitments towards securing the achieved living standard of former wage earners, which in the past had been the key normative principle of social policy in Germany, while at the same time public support and services for families are expanded.
German constitutionalism has gained a central place in the global comparative debate, but what underpins it remains imperfectly understood. Its distinctive conception of the rule of law and the widespread support for its powerful Constitutional Court are typically explained in one of two ways: as a story of change in reaction to National Socialism, or as the continuation of an older nineteenth-century line of constitutional thought that emphasizes the function of constitutional law as a constraint on state power. But while both narratives account for some important features, their explanatory value is ultimately overrated. This book adopts a broader comparative perspective to understand the rise of the German Constitutional Court. It interprets the particular features of German constitutional jurisprudence and the Court's strength as a reconciliation of two different legal paradigms: first, a hierarchical legal culture as described by Mirjan Damaska, building on Max Weber, as opposed to a more co-ordinate understanding of legal authority such as prevails in the United States, and secondly, the turn towards a transformative understanding of constitutionalism, as it is today most often associated with countries such as South Africa and India. Using post-war legal history and sociological and empirical research in addition to case law, this book demonstrates how German constitutionalism has harmonized the frequently conflicting demands of these two legal paradigms, resulting in a distinctive type of constitutional reasoning, at once open, pragmatic, formalist, and technical, which this book labels Value Formalism. Value Formalism, however, also comes with serious drawbacks, such as a lack of institutional self-reflection in the Court's jurisprudence and a closure of constitutional discourse to laymen, whom it excludes from the realm of legitimate interpreters.
While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the “new century” would achieve “normalization.” The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany’s new normalcy and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany’s new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.
A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.
This collection demonstrates the persistence of the initial anxieties about a united Germany and its rapid absorption of the German Democratic Republic, and also suggests a potential optimism that, despite much contemporary domestic disenchantment, the new Germany continues to thrive as a European democracy endeavouring to confront its past.
Urban Transformations is a theoretical and empirical account of the changing nature of urbanization in Germany. Where city planners and municipal administrations had emphasized free markets, the rule of law, and trade in 1871, by the 1930s they favoured a quite different integrative, corporate, and productivist vision. Urban Transformations explores the broad-based social transformation connected to these changes and the contemporaneous shifts in the cultural and social history of global capitalism. Dynamic features of modern capitalist life, such as rapid industrialization, working-class radicalism, dramatic population growth, poor quality housing, and regional administrative incoherence significantly influenced the Greater Berlin region. Examining materials on city planning, municipal administration, architecture, political economy, and jurisprudence, Urban Transformations recasts the history of German and European urbanization, as well as that of modernist architecture and city planning.
This book analyses the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), one of Europe’s most successful and influential political parties. The CDU might have been expected to struggle in the circumstances of a more diverse, secular reunified Germany, yet it has prospered to an extent almost unparalleled in western Europe. Chapters consider the CDU’s policies (the factors driving them, their variation across Germany, the relationship to women, and the welfare state), its organisational development and change, and its position within the party system. Contributors particularly emphasise the diversity of the CDU, and the way it varies across Germany’s regions. The CDU is compared to other Christian Democratic parties, and special consideration is given to the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). This book was published as a special issue of German Politics.
To the surprise of many, regionally embedded clusters of small to medium sized businesses have continued to exist in spite of industrialisation and mass production. While scholars have discovered that the advantages of embeddedness in terms of industrialisation were situated in interfirm cooperation and conflict resolving mechanisms, it is far less clear how changing historical circumstances on the world market, i.e. globalisation, affected such systems. Taking a look inside Leipzig, a capital of the global fur industry between 1870 and 1939 with its numerous highly specialised businesses, both in production as well as trade, World Market Transformation examines the robustness of district firms within the highly volatile international fur business. This book examines how firm embeddedness not only served to overcome challenges related to industrialisation, but also strengthened the abilities of cluster firms to deal with changing world market circumstances. World Market Transformation integrates the "interior-biased" research tradition on local business systems and industrial districts into the "exterior" fields of global and transnational history. It is demonstrated that the local business district not only emerged because of the expansion of international trade, but that district processes of interfirm cooperation also gave shape to the spatial distribution, conventions and structures of the very same world market. The analysis of embedded communities thus offers an important instrument to examine phenomena of economic globalisation, but also how such macro-economic developments have been shaped and actively constructed by local actors.
