Introduction: Can Semisovereignty be Transferred?

Peter Katzenstein's analysis of the ‘semisovereign’ West German state is one of the most enduringly popular conceptualisations of German politics. This chapter asks whether Germans could transfer this widely admired model of policy-making to the new states in eastern Germany. The chapter frames German unification around the idea of ‘institutional transfer’, an idea explored more fully in the next section. The point of departure is the progressive crisis of the state socialist model in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), followed by the collapse of the GDR state, and the widespread hope among eastern Germans that their territories might not merely join the Federal Republic but also be remade in its image (McAdams 1993; Maier 1997; Hampton and Soe 1999).

It would be unrealistic to ask of a model that highlights incremental change to explain the most rapid period of institutional and policy change in the post-war period. In that sense, the question here is not so much whether the semisovereignty model predicts or explains the main contours of unification, but rather whether the political features it highlighted – including incrementalism, political bargaining and societal engagement – survived the move to the east. This is no easy question, for there is no one answer valid across all policy domains. Clearly, institutional transfer has resulted in many similarities between the political economies of western and eastern Germany. The question, however, is whether these similarities are more than ‘skin deep’.