phkrause.bsky.social
Public Finance & Public Admin in the day. Brooding over Germany in the night.
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Very possible, but oh so tempting for the CDU to then pretent the overhaul is a concession in the coalition talks, and for the SPD to pretend they didn't invent it and take the overhaul as a win, and for both to have a laugh about the FDP-APO. Mighty risky, but one can see the temptation.
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Quite. Assuming institutions can't fail because they've never failed is exactly the sort of motivated reasoning that makes institutions fail.
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Well, who says UK politics can't be a model for Europe anymore?
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Denn nein, offensichtlich sorgt das Mehrheitswahlrecht nicht für "klare Verhältnisse", oder Zweiparteiensysteme, und ganz bestimmt nicht für stabile Mehrheiten.
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E.g. to use „Stop me before I kill again“ as headline for a section on the OBR is just admirable commitment to a joke just for the hell of it
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Yup - very clear and setting up an intriguing what if. The details of the Vienna settlement weren’t overdetermined, I *think*.
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Absolutely - I‘m underscoring the large agreement and modest disagreement, world-historically speaking.
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Imperial Germany as a case of autocratic modernization as a sort of precursor to the 20thC cases still looks very iffy to me, because of how incremental liberalization took off, and governance 1890-1914 was such a hot mess that they couldn't have autocrated themselves out of a paper bag
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Before I start reading up on the Westphalian gov't: The larger point to me remains that FF is far more persuasive than AJR about Prussia being very functional in interstate competition ca. 1688-1848, not in spite of but because of its top-down governance.
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Erm, *even* more accelerated? But yes, if Westphalen and Berg had stayed independent (inside the German Bund) post-1815, a lot of history could have gone very differently.
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I know, I know, I took it literally, not seriously
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Marx wasn't a fan though.
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A bit Whiggish maybe... say you're in 1868 and you're looking back to '48. Would you say that France or Germany (the NGF) have made more "progress"? I think (North-)German liberals liked their prospects at the time.
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(Prussia couldn't have had imperial free cities - they would have been Prussian cities. But the Empire had them, and for legal developments, it matters that Prussia and the free cities were part of the same polity)
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That's a fascinating question abt the Rhineland at the level of nitty-gritty political institutions. But high-level, probably not. The biggest part of it used to be church land if memory serves, but also massive impact of French reforms via Westphalia & Berg.
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it was a close-run thing though, and many conservatives never forgot that. Hence Bismarck's line about the coattails of history. Top-down vs bottom-up isn't a binary.
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Yup, I think that’s fair
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Point taken - this from earlier is your Sonderweg argument: bsky.app/profile/pseu.... I would say the shift away from autocratic rule started in 1848 and developments post-1871 all went in that direction, bumps on the road here and there.
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I'm glad that's how narrow the disagreement is now - I said especially post-1900, I very much think this applies to 1870-1900 as well
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Military budgets are a case in point - tell me which one of these is the militarized autocracy?
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I see the institutional development, esp post-1900, basically in the mainstream of Western Europe, messy, contested and rapidly changing.
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Ha, but you are arguing *for* Germany’s very dearly held national self-image… you are making a Sonderweg argument that would get a lot of applause in many a retirement home for German social scientists
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It is not nothing, I agree, and would be fascinating to study, but the main feature today is that it facilitates rule by law in the modern sense
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Yeah, not the UK or France, but far away from autocracy
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Couldn’t spend money without a budget, could increase the military without a budget, couldn’t arrest political opponents, couldn’t censor newspapers, couldn’t realistically - and never did - change the constitution. Barely managed to alter the balance between federation and states in 50 years.
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All the major actors - chancellor, Reichstag, Kaiser, were fundamentally constrained by law - there wasn’t a point between 1871 and 1933 where rule by law was a thing…
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Counterpoint, the political institutions of GER, FRA, UK in the 19th C were very slightly different shades of grey - PRC very, very far away from all three
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Tja, ob das mal so gekommen wäre…
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But now you know