Constitution making after national catastrophes: Germany in 1949 and 1990.

• Author: Markovits, Inga

Constitutions, usually, are new beginnings: after some seismic shift in a country's history--a revolution, a lost war, a collapse of government--a nation sets out to reinvent itself. It can do so by looking back into the past or forward into the future. Most constitutions will do a bit of both, but their character will differ depending on which time perspective is foremost in the drafters' minds. A backward-looking constitution will look to past mistakes--perhaps mistakes that brought about the nation's current predicaments in the first place; will try to prevent their repetition, hold on to past successes, and will favor solid and cautious government structures based on reason and experience. A forward-looking constitution will try to create a new and better world. It will distrust the solutions of the past, which, after all, did not prevent the disarray that the new constitution now must help to overcome. Instead, it will aim for new government structures whose design is fueled by hopes and political convictions.

In this Essay, I will compare three twentieth century German constitutions; all three, responses to political disintegration and collapse. The first, the German Grundgesetz of 1949, drew its inspiration mainly from the past and became extraordinarily successful. The other two, the first East German Constitution, also of 1949, and the last East German attempt at constitution making, the Roundtable Constitution of 1990, looked mainly to the future and were thorough failures. I will describe how considerations for the past or for the future shaped these constitutions, examine what went right or wrong in their respective lives, and ask whether we can draw any lessons from their fate that may explain what it is

that makes a constitution succeed or fail. Did the drafters' attitudes to time play any role in the effectiveness of their creations?

1. THE THREE CONSTITUTIONS

   1. When the three Western Military Governors, in the "Frankfurt Documents" of July 1, 1948, authorized the West Germans to create a constitution that would establish a new, democratic, law-abiding federal state in their war-torn and divided country, local and regional German self-government already existed in all four Allied occupation zones. (1) It was a more or less independent, central German government that the Allies now were looking for. In the West, newly recognized political parties--above all, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD)--ran eleven Land (state) governments, each with its own parliamentary body. A similar multiparty structure of local and Land governments existed in the Soviet Occupation Zone but was increasingly undermined by the ascendance of the Communist Party. When it became obvious that the Soviet and Western occupation powers could not agree on how to reconstruct a united Germany, the Western Allies decided to create their own consolidated West German state. Hence the Allied request that the West Germans establish a constitutional convention to prepare a constitution that was to be ratified by a West German plebiscite.

      The West Germans were keen on self-government but feared that the creation of a West German state would block the path to Germany's future reunification. Instead, they hoped for a provisional governmental structure that would eliminate "the conditions of disorder and anarchy" that plagued their devastated country, "a temporary shelter, not more," (2) to enable citizens to lead an ordinary daily life until the Soviet Occupation Zone would be allowed to join a free and democratic Germany. In the negotiations over the new constitution, some of the most fervent disagreements between the Allied and German representatives concerned semantics. The Germans objected to the lofty title "constitution." They wanted to produce "a functional structure serving the tasks of a transition period" (3) and accordingly favored giving the document a humdrum, administrative-sounding name such as "Grundgesetz" (Basic Law). They also sought to avoid a democratic legitimization of the new charter that might raise it to a higher status than they had in mind; therefore, they rejected a "constitutional convention" in favor of a "Parliamentary Council" elected by the legislative bodies of the Lander, and in the end, over strong American objections that almost led to the collapse of the Allied-German negotiations, succeeded in convincing the Occupation Powers that the new Basic Law should not be approved by popular referendum but by the parliaments of the West German Lander.

      The authors of the Grundgesetz were no men of the people. Of the sixty-five delegates to the Parliamentary Council, two-thirds had a university education, (4) over 60 percent were civil servants, (5) and 41 percent were lawyers. (6) There were only four women in the group. The two large parties--Social Democrats and Christian Democrats--each had twenty-seven seats; nine votes were held by smaller bourgeois parties; two delegates were Communists. The drafters' approach to the work ahead of them was mostly "formed by bourgeois-liberal conceptions of a constitution." (7) The debates in the Parliamentary Council reflected the elevated class background and education of the members; historical references and literary quotations were bantered back and forth. Almost three-quarters of those present had been "professionally disadvantaged" (8) in the Hitler years, but prison sentences under the Nazis, except for some of the Socialists and the two Communists, had been relatively rare. The architects of the Basic Law were neither activists nor rebels, but cultivated intellectuals.

      Nor did they work on a blank canvas. Even before the Parliamentary Council convened, a group of eleven experts and their staff, the "Herrenchiemsee Constitutional Convent," had discussed the main organizing principles of the new constitution and outlined the Grundgesetz's skeleton. Their suggestions exercised a significant influence over the design of the final product. The members of the Herrenchiemsee Convent were appointed by the Land prime ministers and were selected on the basis of their expertise. All had at least one doctorate to their names and all were either professors, high court judges, or highly placed administrators in their respective Land's justice administration. These men--there was no woman among them--did not see their work as an exercise of political power but of legal know-how. Above all, they wanted to avoid what they saw as "the serious structural mistakes" of the Weimar Constitution, (9) and this professional approach was echoed in the debates of the Parliamentary Council. One of its two Communist delegates would later accuse his bourgeois colleagues of not having come up "with a single new idea." (10) The accusation was a bit unfair, but it reflects the gulf between the two lone activists among the drafters and their more refined and intellectual bourgeois colleagues. Both Communist Council members' lives were dominated by their ideology: they had been incarcerated under Hitler, ran into additional trouble with the authorities of the new West German Federal Republic, and eventually left to live in the GDR. In the debates, nobody listened to the Communists. Their surest way of catching the assembly's attention was by way of catcalls.

      The bourgeois majority, meanwhile, set out to design a state that would give temporary shelter to the new democracy but that would not foreclose future political choices made by a hopefully reunited German nation. Despite most members' fear and loathing of the Soviet model of government ("By tomorrow, the Bolsheviks might be here," one of the delegates said on one occasion), (11) the Basic Law does not rule out large-scale nationalizations of land and industrial property as long as individual and social interests are "justly balanced." (12) But those tricky issues would be for future legislatures to decide. For the time being, the provisional character of their work meant that the drafters of the constitution held on to traditionally accepted values. The Weimar Constitution's rules on the relations between church and state, for instance, or on the structure of the civil service, which seemed to have worked well enough in previous times, were simply carried over into the Grundgesetz. The inclusion of "God" into the final version of the Preamble evoked no real objections. The drafters opted for a "catalogue of classical basic rights" (13) because those rights, considering Germany's recent past, now seemed more essential to good governance than ever. Suggestions to include some social rights, as the Weimar Constitution of 1919 had done by promising help for families with many children (14) or "the support needed" for people out of work, (15) popped up occasionally in the debate but were quickly rejected as only encouraging "illusions" and "false hopes." (16) One of the Communists objected to the short-range time horizon of his bourgeois colleagues: "One can't design a constitution that is confined by its present location in time. We must give purpose and direction to the constitution." (17) But the majority decided on "modesty in these matters." (18)

      In the end, Article 20 of the Basic Law did declare the Federal Republic to be a "democratic and social state," and this provision, as we shall see, would take on great significance in the years to come. (19) But its inclusion in the constitution was something of an accident: because the definition was neither thought through nor properly debated, it was accepted by people of very different persuasions and passed as a vague and formulaic compromise to a problem that the drafters never properly articulated in the first place. (20)

      The fathers and few mothers of the Basic Law did not have the optimism necessary to embark on fundamental social change. The past weighed on their minds and was often mentioned. "Considering what we have experienced in...