The Problem of Federalism

A Study in the History of Political Theory - Volume Two

Sobei Mogi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

First published in 1931. The Problem of Federalism provides a comprehensive and critical survey of the historical development and practical application of the idea of federalism as a form of state organisation. The author explores federal ideas from the eighteenth- up until the early twentieth-century. This extensive study will be useful to students of politics and philosophy.

CHAPTER VII

CONTEMPORARY GERMAN FEDERALISM

§1

Through the defeat of the Kaiser’s military forces in 1918 and the consequent revolution of November gth of the same year, the social and political structure of Germany shifted its basis from the German Empire under Prussian hegemony to the German Federal Republic.

With the exception of a group of persons, socialists and democrats, the political trend in Germany had reached the highest stage of Obrigkeits-Kaiserreich in 1914. The Great War is really an epoch in the history of the transition from the old regime of the raison d’état in central Europe to the creation of republican or socialist states. In the year 1914 international anarchy in Europe easily fomented world-wide upheavals by crystallising the ambition of each Great Power to establish its own supremacy.¹ The Alliance and the Entente between European Powers resulted from the clashing of interests due to capitalist dominance over the national states.

The Allied Powers—England, France, Belgium, Italy and Tsarist Russia—vis-à-vis the Central Alliance—Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey—brought about the closing of the chapter of the history of the autocratic, monarchical states based on capitalist economic supremacy and opened the new chapter of transition from the old political and capitalist state to the ideal socialist commonwealth.

Germany’s political conditions and the minds of her people, under the discipline of Bismarckian dictatorship and Prussian hegemony in the name of the federal Empire, tended to concentrate all material and spiritual resources, in the whole of the German Empire as well as in her Germanic allied states, the Empire of Austria-Hungary, on the attainment of the single aim of victory in the war and with it realisation of the illusion of the Kaiser’s Great Empire. In the early stages of the Great War any anti-war movement, stimulated by the socialists or pacifists, could not prevent the overwhelming tendency towards the mystical absorption of the war policy for the glory of the Germanic Empire.

¹ G. Lowes Dickenson: International Anarchy, 1926.

The real demands of the German people, hidden under the veneer of prosperity, were not revealed until the “hunger blockade” affected seriously the workers and people and led to the strike of 200,000 metal-workers in April 1917, and to successive strikes after that. The overthrow of the Tsar’s domination in March 1917 gave to the revolutionary movement in Germany a concrete ideal.¹

At the same time the formation of great economic associations² under the Imperial Chancellor had been started since March 1915 to centralise the nation’s economic activities for the purpose of the War, and the system of Annexionsreden instead of censorship was set up; these two factors prevented any freedom of discussion directed against war.

The centralisation of the state functions and economic machinery under the Chancellor and the General Commissioner gave no opportunity to the socialists to make any propaganda in favour of peace, though the suggestion of peace had first been put forward by Hugo Haase in the Reichstag in March 1915.

The failure of the U-boats war in 1917 and the final victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in November of the same year led the revolutionary leaders and the masses of the German proletariat into the direct action of the “Mass strike” in January 1918.

Peace had been made with Soviet Russia, and the message to the German workers from Trotsky and Lenin, and the Council of the People’s Commissaries, was published in Vorwärts on December 1, 1917,³ and the subsequent propaganda of peace and revolution by the Soviet Government on the German eastern front made headway and led to revolutionary outbreaks.⁴

After the failure of the offensive on the western front in April 1918 the only chance for the imperial government was to form a coalition government with the socialists and this resulted in the setting-up of the new government of Prince Max von Baden and Herr Scheidemann in September.⁵

General Ludendorf’s offer of an Armistice on October 2, 1918, hastened the great catastrophe of the German imperial power, and manifested the apparent downfall of the bourgeois classes.

¹ Richard Müller: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, Vol. I, 1924, p. 96.

² Bund der Landwirte, Deutscher Bauern-Bund, Zentralverband deutschen Industriellen, Bund der Industriellen, Hansabund und Reichsdeutsche Mittelstandsbund.

³ Richard Müller: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, Vol. I, 1924, p. 97.

⁴ Ibid., p. 113.

⁵ Ibid., pp. 121–124.

The mutiny of the Kaiser’s fleet at Kiel on October 28th brought about the creation of the Soldiers’ Council on November 4th, and the Red flag was hoisted on all warships. The dispatch by the government of Noske, a Social Democrat, to Kiel, to subdue the outbreak brought about the formation of a Workers’ Council to join the Soldiers’ Council.

The successive victories of the revolutionary movements in Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen followed and the tide of revolution spread within a week from Schwerin to Hanover and Cologne and down to Leipzig and Frankfurt under the control of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council.¹

The first republican declaration in a German state was made in Bavaria under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, under whose chairmanship the Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Council was formed on November 8th.

In agreement with the fourteen points of President Wilson, the resolution of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council and the historic letter sent to the Imperial Chancellor in the name of the socialist party by Scheidemann, a member of Prince Max of Baden’s cabinet, demanded the abdication of the Kaiser. The socialist ministers resigned from the government and threatened to proclaim a general strike if the abdication did not immediately take place. On November 8th the ultimatum of Scheidemann brought about the abdication and the renunciation by the Crown Prince of the right of succession.

On November 9, 1918, the Berlin workers were summoned from the factories and there was a mass demonstration during the morning. The paralysis of the government assured the absolute victory of the workers.

The interview between Ebert, Scheidemann, and the Imperial Chancellor resulted in the proclamation of the abdication of the Kaiser and the transference of the sovereign power to the Reichstag. The resignation by Prince Max of the Chancellorship was the formal downfall of the old Empire and put the whole destiny of Germany and her sovereignty into the hands of the people and of the socialist majority.

The proclamation of Ebert on November 9th: “Fellow-citizens, the late Chancellor, with the assent of all his ministers, has transferred to me the direction of affairs. I shall form a government in association with the parties. The new government will be a people’s government. Its aim must be to bring peace to the German people as quickly as possible, and to safeguard the freedom which it has won. Fellow-citizens, I implore you to preserve tranquillity and order”; was the overthrow of the Kaiserreich and the creation of a new German Republic by a bloodless revolution.¹

¹ Richard Müller: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, Vol. I, 1924, pp. 134, 135, 136, 137.

The history of the November revolution in Germany was a conflict not merely between capital and labour but also between labour and labour, because of the differing conceptions as to the socialistic approach towards the goal of the ideal socialist commonwealth. The November revolution started with the peaceful overthrow of the old régime, and a struggle then began between the groups of the majority socialists of the Social Democratic Party and the parties of the minority socialists—the Independent Social Democratic Party—and the communists of the Spartakusbund.

As Ebert was upheld as the leader of the country, the first thing which he and his colleagues ought to have done was to form a provisional government in harmony with the already formed Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council and other Socialist and Communist groups.

Consultations took place between Scheidemann and the representatives of the Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (U.S.P.D.) and the Spartakusbund. The main discussion between the leaders of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (S.P.D.) and those of the U.S.P.D. concentrated on the point of legal socialist policy and the consequent formation of the National Assembly based on universal suffrage. The majority socialists put forward six proposals:—(1) Germany should be a social Republic; (2) in this republic the whole of the executive, legislative and judicial powers should be exclusively in the hands of the elected representatives of all the working population and the soldiers; (3) exclusion of all civic members from the governments; (4) the participation of the independent members to be valid only for three days as a provisional arrangement, in order to create a government capable of concluding an armistice; (5) departmental ministers should be allowed as technical advisers of the actual and decisive cabinet; (6) equal authority of both leaders of the cabinet.² Liebknecht and his Spartakists refused to join in any government with the “legal socialists.” But the U.S.P.D. made a conditional agreement to join the cabinet in order to secure the revolutionary socialist gains. It claimed that the cabinet should consist of social democrats having an equal share of authority as representatives of the nation. This limitation, however, was not to apply to the departmental ministers who were only technical advisers of the cabinet; two members of the Social Democratic Party were to be allotted to each of these ministers as colleagues. There should be no delay in the inclusion of the independent social democrats in the cabinet, to which every party should send three members; political authority was to be in the hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, who were to be summoned at once to a General Assembly from all over the country; the question of the constituent assembly should be determined only after consolidation of the conditions brought about by the revolution and should therefore be reserved for future discussion.¹

¹ Richard Müller: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik, Vol. II, 1924, pp. 22, 24.

² Ibid., p. 28.

Under these conditions the U.S.P.D. was ready to agree to be represented in the cabinet by three members, Haase, Dittmann and Barth.

Although there had been a diversity of opinion as to peace between the leaders of the two parties, yet the opposition to the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat by the theoretical leader of the U.S.P.D., Karl Kautsky, had a great deal of influence on the majority of the leaders of that party and caused them to favour democratic legal socialism rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The political controversy between the two different opinions in Vorwärts and in Die Rote Fahne took the form of sweeping criticisms of the contrasting tactics of the two parties.

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and their Spartakist group stood quite aloof from this formation of the provisional government, in order to prepare both openly and secretly the proletariat revolution saying: free from “the naked, plundering interests of imperialism,” “do not allow Scheidemann to stay any longer in the government, … as long as a government of socialists h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter IV: Federal Ideas of Various German Schools of Thought
• Chapter V: Genossenschaftstheorie as Federalism. Gierke and Preuss
• Chapter VI: Development of Federal Ideas, 1890–1918
• Chapter VII: Contemporary German Federalism
• Chapter VIII: The Legal Federalism of Hans Kelsen
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index