How come Germany is now a federal state and Italy is unitary, given their (similar) history of being divided up until XIX century? How their unifications where different?

by jasie3k
Aleksx000

This is basically two questions at once: Why is Germany federalized? Why is Italy not?

As someone who focusses on Germany, I will try to lay emphasis on the first question. That said, I invite my Italian and Italy-focussed fellows to correct and extend me where possible.

So first off, Germany.

The reason Germany is a federalized state does not really go back to 1871 and the Unification of the many German states as much as it goes back to 1945/49 and the end of World War 2 and subsequent creation of the (West) German democracy. That said, the current Federal States are modelled to look like the states of old in some cases, even though for example Prussia has been dissolved.

Germany had been somewhat federalized from 1871 through to 1933/34. The German parliaments had been along the lines of traditional German states, with mentioned Prussia being the biggest of them.

Nazi Germany then centralized the country, and abolished local representation and local parliaments in favor of their top-down hierarchy. There were several levels of autonomy, from no autonomy at all, which would be most of Germany over the Reichsgaue, which entailed territories like Austria and the Sudetenland to the Reichsprotektorat (Protectorate of the Reich) in Bohemia and Moravia, which is the center of today's Czech Republic.

Now, the lessons West German, and to some extent East German, lawmakers drew from this is that a centralized government is too good at turning a country into an autocracy and that some sort of legislation at least somewhat parallel to the American 10th Amendment, ensuring the rights of states against the federal government, would be necessary.

This came in form of Artikel 20 des Grundgesetzes für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the 20th Article of West German (and now German) Civil Law.

  1. The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social Federal State.
  1. All state authority is derived from the people. It shall be exercised by the people through elections and other votes and through specific legislative, executive and judicial bodies.
  1. The legislature shall be bound by constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice.

Okay, thats a bunch of legal stuff. To close it off, I have to stress that this is one of only two "Eternity Clauses" (Ewigkeitsklauseln), as defined under Article 79-3 of the Civil Law code. Article 79-3 states that any legislation trying to revoke the federalization of Germany or the Articles 1 and 20 is illegal under all circumstances.

(3) Amendments to this Basic Law affecting the division of the Federation into Länder, their participation on principle in the legislative process, or the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20 shall be inadmissible.

So why did Germany put this onto themselves? Well, as I said, a centralized government, in the minds of the people who created the Republic in 1949, meant trouble if too powerful.

However, before our American readers get the idea that Germany has something like the mentioned Tenth Amendment, that is not the case. Political issues can be discussed on both the state and the federal level, but federal law overwrites state law. The state law of Hesse theoretically could allow for the death penalty, but federal law overwrites it, hence the death penalty is illegal in Hesse.

However, several authorities have been guaranteed to the Federal States.

  • Both hiring and paying officials. That includes teachers. States have thus been also given the right to their own education policy.

  • Building and maintaining all roads except for interstate motorways.

  • Museums and several types of hospitals; and their respective policies.

  • Local lawmaking and local justice. Both can however be overwritten by federal institutions.

  • Policing. This, again, comes from the nazis, who used a centralized police force as their own paramilitary force. There is a federal police force, the Bundespolizei, but most policemen are part of the respective local police forces, the Landespolizeien.

Germany TLDR: After the nazis, German democrats didnt like centralizing the government and wanted strong local representations.

Sources:

  • Lawmakers of the Federal Republic of Germany: Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland

  • Hoke, Rudolf: Österreichische und Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte

  • v. Sternburg, Wilhelm: Adenauer - eine deutsche Legende

  • Wucher, Albert: Marksteine der Deutschen Zeitgeschichte

Hroppa

To take an entirely different approach to Aleksx000, there is a strand of literature on the causes of federalisation which emphasises infrastructural capacity as as a pre-condition for federalism. That is to say, you need a highly developed government infrastructure in order to create a federation. Italy and Germany are the textbook examples, in this theory.

Italian states had relatively poorly developed infrastructure during Italian unification. This meant that Italy simply couldn't be unified through federalisation - the governmental infrastructure had to be built from scratch in order to create a nation-state.

In contrast, Germany had a highly developed infrastructure of goverment, with working, widely accepted and deeply penetrative governmental institutions. This meant that the easiest way to unify Germany was for Prussia to co-opt existing institutions as part of a federal framework.

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