Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 On the Origins of Western Democracy
- Part I Sharing Sovereignty
- Part II Historical Evidence on Western Democratic Transitions
- 9 Setting the Stage
- 10 Liberalism and Reform in the Transformative Century
- 11 Fine-Grained Constitutional Bargaining
- 12 An Overview of British Constitutional History
- 13 Constitutional Exchange in the United Kingdom
- 14 The Swedish Transition to Democracy
- 15 Constitutional Reform in the Netherlands
- 16 Germany
- 17 The Japanese Transition to Democracy and Back
- 18 The United States, an Exception or Further Illustration?
- Part III Analytical History as Social Science
- Appendix Methodological Approach, Limits, and Extensions
- References
- Index
16 - Germany
Constitutional Negotiations in an Emerging State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 On the Origins of Western Democracy
- Part I Sharing Sovereignty
- Part II Historical Evidence on Western Democratic Transitions
- 9 Setting the Stage
- 10 Liberalism and Reform in the Transformative Century
- 11 Fine-Grained Constitutional Bargaining
- 12 An Overview of British Constitutional History
- 13 Constitutional Exchange in the United Kingdom
- 14 The Swedish Transition to Democracy
- 15 Constitutional Reform in the Netherlands
- 16 Germany
- 17 The Japanese Transition to Democracy and Back
- 18 The United States, an Exception or Further Illustration?
- Part III Analytical History as Social Science
- Appendix Methodological Approach, Limits, and Extensions
- References
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION: GERMAN DECENTRALIZATION AND SOVEREIGNTY
The next three historical narratives are less obvious applications of the king-and-council model of constitutional reform. Two are cases not usually associated with gradual democratization, Germany and Japan. The other case is often considered a revolutionary state, the United States of America, although as shown in Chapter Eighteen, parliamentary democracy had substantially emerged at the colonial level well before its war of secession. These more problematic cases help to test the generality of the theory of constitutional reform developed in Part I, a theory that is intended to explain more than the successful nineteenth-century democratic transitions of a few European constitutional monarchies.
The first of the difficult cases to be examined is Germany. The history of Germany in the nineteenth century is usually told with an eye on the twentieth century, a century in which German foreign policy led to two continental wars of mass destruction. That such a fate lay ahead was not evident to observers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, nor was it inevitable. Indeed, observers in 1820 would have been surprised by this prediction. Germany had a very weak central government in the decades before, during, and after Napoleon’s invasion of the Holy Roman Empire in the late eighteenth century. The empire was less a government than a loose association of independent city-states and duchies linked by language, religion, and commerce. There was clearly a German culture during this period, but the existence of a German government was debatable.
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- Perfecting ParliamentConstitutional Reform, Liberalism, and the Rise of Western Democracy, pp. 449 - 484Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010