Formation of Vertical and Horizontal Regional Relationships in Postwar Germany

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1. My research is aimed at analyzing the formation of the postwar German federal system. In order to do research on this problem I paid attention to the vertical and horizontal relationships between the federal government and the state government. From such point of view I considered the role of the different actors, for example the political parties, the different governments during military occupation, state prime ministers in the process of the enactment of the Basic Law in 1949. The main targets in this research are (1) the process of forming the second chamber and (2) the discourse on federalism in postwar Germany. I collected original documents touching on these issues in German archives in August 2005.2. I published a paper entitled 'The Formation of the German Second Chamber' in June 2004. In this paper I described differences and similarities between federal systems in the Frankfurt Constitution, the Second German Empire Constitution and the Weimar Constitution from the path dependency viewpoint. In addition I analyzed concepts of federal representative system of parties and the compromise process as regarding the second chamber during the debate on the Basic Law. Through this research the historical causality of the formation of the second chamber in relation to the postwar political situation, bureaucracy and party politics was elucidated.3. After finalizing the paper I turned the research focus to the discourse on federalism in postwar Germany. I investigated the ideas of federalism that developed out of the interaction between Konrad Adenauer in his term as the president of the Parliamentary Council discussing the Basic Law, the Social Democratic Party president Kurt Schumacher, and Lucius Clay, head of the US Military government in Germany. I also worked through a large amount of material concerning discourse surrounding federalism in postwar German. I am planning to complete a paper about 'Discourse around Federalism under German Occupation'.