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The State and the Transformation of Political Legitimacy in East and West Germany since 1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Mary Fulbrook
Mary Fulbrook
Affiliation:
University College London
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Extract

Recent German history has produced a remarkable succession of state forms: an empire riddled with internal social tensions, brought down by external defeat in a world war for which it bore a large degree of responsibility; an unstable and ultimately suicidal parliamentary democracy; a genocidal dictatorship which eventually collapsed, totally defeated by opponents of its expansionist and increasingly radical foreign and domestic plans; and, concurrently, two remarkably stable and enduring instances of quite different political types, liberal parliamentary democracy in the capitalist west, and “actually existing socialism” based in democratic centralism in the communist east. Compared to their respective Western and Eastern European neighbours, the Germans on both sides of the inner-German border are now sustaining and reproducing their respective political systems with remarkable efficiency. Put crudely, it seems that good Nazis have been turned into good democrats and good communists, respectively.

Type
Comparative Politics
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 1987 , pp. 211 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1987

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References

I am grateful to the British Academy and the University of London for support in connection with this research.

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