Abstract

The paper is a contribution to a book edited by, "Semisovereignty Revisited: Governance, Institutions and Policies in United Germany". The book will appear in 2003 or 2004. It explores to what extent Peter Katzenstein's seminal study of the "semi-sovereign" German state in the 1980s is still valid. The paper looks at one of the showpieces of Katzenstein's theory of beneficial semisovereignty, German industrial relations, and follows their development from the "Modell Deutschland" of the 1976 election campaign to "Schröder's Bündnis für Arbeit". It comes to the conclusion that as far as Germany is concerned, the days are gone when it was an advantage for the governance of industrial relations to have a weak state.