Abstract
From the time of its founding in 1871 until after World War I, the German Empire (Reich) extended from Alsace-Lorraine, west of the Rhine, all the way to the Russian border in the northeast. After each of the two world wars, however, Germany lost significant portions of this extensive territory. At the end of World War II, for example, the Postdam agreement recognized the transfer of large sections of eastern Germany into the “administration” of Poland and the Soviet Union—in part, to compensate Poland for territory that had been annexed by the Soviet Union. Moreover, Germany was completely occupied by the victorious allies, whose governments agreed to administer German territory in four separate zones.
For earlier writings of the author discussing themes considered in this chapter, see, for example, The Imperfect Union: Constitutional Structures of German Unification (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); “The Constitutional and Legal Framework of German Unification,” in Der Vereinigungsschock. Vergleichende Betrachtungen zehn Jahre danach, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter and Peter E. Quint (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2001), 19–38; “60 Years of the Basic Law and its Interpretation: An American Perspective,” Jahrbuch des Öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart 57 (2009), Iff. See also note 48, infra.
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Notes
M. Donald Hancock and Henry Krish, Politics in Germany (Washington: CQ Press, 2009), 130, 135. For 2009 election results, see “The German Election’s Biggest Winner,” Spiegel Online, September 27, 2009.
Peter Barker, “The Party of Democratic Socialism as Political Voice of East Germany,” in United and Divided: Germany Since 1990, ed. Mike Dennis and Eva Kolinsky (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 55.
See, for example, Axel Wolz, Michael Kopsidis, and Klaus Reinsberg, “The Transformation of Agricultural Production Cooperatives in East Germany and Their Future,” Journal of Rural Cooperation 37 (2009), 5, 15–16.
See Hans C. Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler, Contesting Agriculture: Cooperativism and Privatization in the New Eastern Germany (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 305.
John Eidson and Gordon Milligan, “Cooperative Entrepreneurs? Collectivisation and Privatisation of Agriculture in Two East German Regions,” in The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition, ed. Chris Hann et al. (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 60.
See John Eidson, “Collectivization, Privatization, Dispossession: Changing Property Relations in an East German Village, 1945–2000,” Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Working Paper No. 27 (2001), 24.
For the use of this argument in German parliamentary debate, see Joyce Mushaben, Geoffrey Giles, and Sara Lennox, “Women, Men, and Unification: Gender Politics and the Abortion Struggle Since 1989,” in After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch (Providence: Berghahn, 1997), 156–57.
A similar argument was employed by opponents of the liberalization of abortion in France in the 1970s. See Simone Veil, Les hommes aussi s’en souviennent. Une loi pour l’Histoire (Paris: Stock, 2004), 71–73.
See, for example, Alan Cowell, “Obeying Pope, German Bishops End Role in Abortion System,” New York Times, January 28, 1998. The full story is recounted in Mary Anne Case, “Perfectionism and Fundamentalism in the Application of the German Abortion Laws,” in Constituting Equality: Gender Equality and Comparative Constitutional Law, ed. Susan H. Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 93.
See, for example, Daniela Reitz and Gerd Richter, “Current Changes in German Abortion Law,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 19 (2010), 334.
For important decisions of the German courts in these cases, see, for example, 95 BVerfGE 96 (1996) (Constitutional Court); 39 BGHSt 1 (1992) (BGH: Federal Supreme Court). The European Court of Human Rights also found that convictions based on these arguments did not violate Article 7(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights, prohibiting retroactive criminal conviction. See Streletz, Kessler, and Krenz v. Germany, 2001-II Eur. Ct. H. R. 351. See also Baumgarten v. Germany, Communication No. 960/2000, UN Doc. CCPR/C/78/D/960/2000 (2003) (statement of UN Human Rights Committee finding that conviction of the chief of GDR border guards on similar arguments did not violate the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights). For the author’s views on the German cases, see, “The Border Guard Trials and the East German Past—Seven Arguments,” American Journal of Comparative Law 48 (2000), 54lff.; “Judging the Past: The Prosecution of East German Border Guards and the GDR Chain of Command,” Review of Politics 61 (1999), 303ff.
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© 2011 Peter C. Caldwell and Robert R. Shandley
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Quint, P.E. (2011). German Unification and the Federal Constitutional Court: A Retrospective View After Twenty Years. In: Caldwell, P.C., Shandley, R.R. (eds) German Unification. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337954_8
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