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As new laws are being passed, it is usually well known in Germany that the opposition will not be happy with it. Our German political landscape included two sides: Coalition and opposition, who almost never work together. The opposition is actually only some sort of deliverer for the media. They have to criticize everything so that media can report about it and make the people angry, who should then protest. Yet, as we know that also protests are not always—or rather seldom—heard, the whole situation seems helpless.

Thus, opposition has found—favoured by the new situation in Bundesrat where they have a majority—a new method to deem laws. Instead of only telling how bad some laws were, they also try to threaten the coalition by mentioning the Federal Constitutional Court. As it is not possible to call Constitutional Court based on the Basic Law in these cases, they argue that the decisions should be made by both Bundestag (federal) and Bundesrat (states). There are some laws in Germany, which have to be settled by both of them including mail or railway, but most important all laws concering the finances of states and communities.

Since the Federal Constitutional Court has gained high popularity due to its decisions against surveillance, opposition seems to be trying to use this method now. However, at the same time they are degrading the Constitutional Court to a nearly worthless level on which everybody can use it as a threat against decisions he does not like. Instead of killing the high respect our Constitutional Court has, opposition should rather try to give exact propsals for better laws, because often you have the feeling that they do not know it better, either.

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In ancient Rome, politicians knew how to keep the people satisfied and quiet. There is a famous slogan for their method known as PANEM ET CIRCENSES meaning “bread and games”. This saying implies that the Roman people was held silent with free corn and free games. Nowadays, the slogan seems out-of-date and people think they can watch politics all the time, but when important sport events begin, we see how wrong this assumption is.

This week the G8 and G20 summit (G20 of the most important industrial countries, not the G20 of development countries) take place and the Canadian government spends 1.1 billion dollars for it. Most of the money goes into security for the politicians: 933 million dollars. Another part will be used for artificial nature, even though there is enough nature in Canada outside. — Yet, maybe politicians need to see how nice the world can be rebuilt even if we destroy the real nature.

Politics below soccer

However, instead of criticizing these high costs in times of crisis, many news papers rather care about soccer and how the German team will play against England on Sunday. In my own news paper, the G20 summit of Toronto has been mentioned in a small article of two columns and about ten lines. No word about the heavy demonstration when G8 summit took place in Germany, no word about the demonstrations in Canada, no word about the investments into artificial nature and no word about this year’s investments being 10 times as high as last years in the US.

News papers are not able to care about politics, they need to deal with soccer and thus it is no wonder that polticians are having a debate about financial cuts at exactly this moment. Of course, there has been a small debate before, but this was the beginning, when everybody mentioned his ideas. The important discussions are going on now, the final proposals for law are written now and the law will be passed soon. Thus, politics can be glad to see that the German soccer team has won against Ghana and the reporting will go on.

…and anything else

Of course it is not only the World Cup that leads to such situations. Events like the Eurovision song contest can also help politics as many news papers rather want to report about our winner Lena (even though she does not talk with these news papers) instead of political discussions. These news papers are the bad ones anyway, but they have a huge audience and big impact on politics. When many politicians of the SPD agreed to critical laws in the last election period, one of their most important members said that they had been afraid of a famous—and very bad—news paper.

So, we will always see politicians trying to have important debates at times when there are popular events and as World Cup or Olympics take much longer than the Eurovision Songcontest, they are predestined.

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Three Candidates for Presidency

Three days after the retirement of our former president, the conservative coalition has chosen a candidate for presidency, ignoring the opposition’s recommendations to suggest a candidate that could be elected by all parties. The coalition instead proposed Christian Wulff, current minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia and member of the CDU.

As soon as government had decided to propose Wulff, two of the three oppositional parties (i.e. SPD and the Greens) suggested Joachim Gauck, not member of any party. Gauck fought the GDR and was responsible for the Stasi files after the defeat of the GDR. He has an attitude which can be roughly explained as “American freedom” meaning that he is very liberal. This also lead to criticism from social-democratic non-politicians and the left-wing party Die Linke.

Die Linke thus discussed if they should propose another candidate, trying to find an agreement within the party. The result according to media was that “the party chair has put through its opinion”: Die Linke proposed Luc Jochimsen as third candidate and they will also support her in a second or third voting. This shows the huge distrust against Gauck.

Voting According to Party Will

Now, representatives of all parties are told to vote for their own candidate and most of them will probably also follow the party line. Germany has a strong tradition of party politics and the so called “Fraktionsdiziplin” recommends each representative to vote according to the own faction’s leaders opinion. This makes oppositional ideas automatically evil. They might be the best ideas ever, the coalition will dismiss them anyway, just because you are supposed to vote as your own leaders do.

Since presidential elections are secret, you will however find more people who do not follow this rule. Furthermore, there are not only politicians in the Bundesversammlung who votes the president, but there might also be celebrities (Bundesrat can chose representatives as it wants).

Thus, the election could be exciting. It could… if everything had worked as expected.

Paltering Behind the Curtain

To get many votes from the political opponents, SPD and Greens—both usually caring very much about social security—have chosen a liberal politician as their candidate for presidency. They explained that they saw the need for a “non-party candidate”, but selecting Gauck as the one to be was rather calculation than persuasion. And it seemed to work. A few days after the presentation of Mr. Gauck as an alternative candidate several liberal politicians of the FDP said they want to support Gauck instead of the real CDU and FDP candidate Wulff who is rather conservative than liberal.

Yet, as the Die Linke will not support Gauck due to his lack of social dedication, the Red-Green strategy might not work that well. Besides, the German caricaturist Klaus Stuttmann published a picture about the FDP’s thoughts on the presidential election. Its content can be translated as: “Hello Angela [Merkel], no rising taxes! otherwise we not vote for Wulff. A good friend”.

This would mean that the opposition has shot themselves in the foot, because they wanted to impose higher taxes for the rich argumenting with Basic Law article 14:

(2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.

It seems like the FDP now uses its chance to vote for a candidate that would fit themselves, but not their more mighty coalition partner CDU to impose their own ideas against the majority will. You might wonder why this works, as the CDU could also refuse: Some observers say that as soon as the oppositional candidate is voted for new president, our chancellor Merkel will receive her political death blow and would have to retire.

New elections however—and maybe the FDP has not enough foresight here—would be another desaster for the liberal party, as their popularity is really low at the moment.

Sometimes, if you plan too much, you (as we use to say in Germany) “wake up in front of a pile of broken glass”.

The German President Horst Köhler has retreated from his position on May 31, 2010. To enable you to understand this, I have to explain what happened within the past few days.

Köhler gave an interview to Deutschlandradio in which he said that in each war we also have to consider economical ideas, because we are an export nation. This has been criticized a lot by politicians from all parties, but actually he only said the truth. Of course each nation is going to war for some sort of economical considerations. The USA invaded Iraq because they want to establish oil trade with a democratic and stable country and Afghanistan has a lot of resources as the German magazine Spiegel has shown (German) including copper, gas and oil. Moreover, Afghanistan has a good strategic position for the US being next to China, Pakistan and Iran.

Now Köhler has retreated because he said that the criticism within the past few days did not show enough respect for his position.

Our Secretary of Commerce, Brüderle (FDP), agreed that the President must have a special position outside of party politics, which enables him to criticize parties and he should not be criticized as harsh as Secretaries like himself. However, there are also both politicians and citizens who think that a President has to deal with criticism and should not give up instantly.

What does the German President do?

Our President is not as mighty as the President of the USA who controls politics. Having learned from Third Reich we cut the power of the President and imposed him to appeal to politicians’ morals.

The German President’s task is to—or at least Köhler set these tasks for himself—criticize not daily politics, but more the general trends. Köhler’s most important aim was his mission for Africa, but he was also liked by the German people because he was not politician (even though member of the CDU) and thus had enough distance to all parties. The President’s most important formal task is to sign laws so that they can be published in the Bundesgesetzblatt and become active law.

Köhler was called critical towards his own government, because he stopped several laws. One thing that the we as the internet community often seem to forget in our criticism against Köhler: He did sign the censorship law directly, but demanded more information by the government—which is a huge signal. Moreover, it is not Köhler’s duty to check laws for content, but only for their creation. One time the government wanted to impose a law onto cities, which is not allowed anymore: Köhler did not sign it. Content is then checked by the Constitutional Court if they are asked to do so.

Legal Aspects

As for now, the President of the Bundesrat will take Köhler’s position until a new President will have been voted. At the moment this is Jens Böhrnsen, a rather quiet person who only meets publicity when he really wants to criticize something. For example, he wanted to attend our Constitutional Court because of government’s plans to cut money for Länder.

As our Grundgesetz defines in article 54 (4) a new President has to be elected within maximum 30 days. This means, we will have a new President in July.

(4) The Federal Convention shall meet not later than thirty days before the term of office of the Federal President expires or, in the case of premature termination, not later than thirty days after that date. It shall be convened by the President of the Bundestag.

The new President now will probably be some politician, because media is now discussing if Köhler was not experienced enough. However, I think that it is better to have a President who has enough distance to party politics. Together with a friend I have discussed if it might be good to have the former protestant church leader Margot Käßmann as President, because she also tells criticism directly (as with her well known quotation: “Nothing is good in Afghanistan”).

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You might remember that I have reported about the students’ protests in Austria which already began in Germany some weeks later. Students had conquered lecture halls of their university and stayed there to fight for more democracy and a better situation.

Not even compensating inflation

I did not know if I should laugh or resignate when I saw the outcome of the plans to change everything. The government had decided to raise support for non-wealthy students by 2%. Wow, 2%! That’s a fucking lot considering that the normal inflation (except these two years of recession) is about 3%. This means that the costs for different products you buy (the Federal Statistical Office has a virtual shopping cart with all kind of products) increases by 3% per year, but you get 2% more financial help in a time span of several years.

Moreover, we hear the same postulations as every year: “There need to be more scholarships”. This is true, but then create them and do not talk about it all day long! Why are there political scholarships which require you to be member of a specific party, mainly CDU or SPD? There are not many youths who want to be member of CDU or SPD, because their structure is neither flexible nor modern anymore and so these scholarships are basically worthless for most students.

“You are worthless!”

The Financial Ministers of several Länder now carry the situation to extremes. They declined the raise, because it was too expensive. I wonder if they know that we will be paying retirement pensions in future.

Germany does not have anything except knowledge, thus they are spitting in their own bowl by not improving support for students. On the one hand they adapt Bachelor’s and Master’s degree which transform university into a full-time job and education industry instead of free learning and then they want to cancel help for students who cannot pay for their studies. That’s exactly the right way! Go on like this and you will destroy Germany’s good position.

There’s two possibilities: Either students are enabled to work while doing studies or they are supported by the state. The financial aid is not even a full payment, but a mixture of payment and credit, meaning that you have to return 50% of what you got. Comparing this with the offered increase of 2%, the state would have to finance only 1%. I do not mind if they pay 2% more or not, because it’s baiscally 10€ per student, but I do mind the signal they are giving to younger generation.

We are paying your wages, we are paying the wages of company owners, because we are the ones inventing new stuff. We are holding Germany’s title as research country high and you are kicking our asses.

In the night from 30th of April to 1st of May there is Walpurgis Night a festival to dance and celebrate together while putting up the Maypole. The 1st of May then is celebrated mostly by labour parties as being an international day of workers.

Children Going Crazy

I do not know when or how it began that young children go around at night and mess other people’s property up. However, some people say that in the past it was rather thought as playing tricks on people. Nowadays children are only throwing paper and and spray shaving foam around. I never really understood this procedure and do not understand it yet.

Reading the news of our village today, I found out that this year the children used even eggs and flour to damage walls of houses and cars. The eggshells caused scratches on the car and the wall could not be cleaned again totally. The children were also said to have thrown fireworks into a crown of people obviously showing a lack of even the slightest reasonable behaviour. It must have been small firecrackers, because nobody actually got injured, but these kids must be really mindless. I could say that today’s youth does not have any moral anymore, but this has also been said by Greek philosophers. Yet, it might not be that wrong. I guess that there are two possibilities to make children go mad:

1. no future at all
2. too much of everything without having to work for it

We in Germany live in state 2 while e.g. in African slums, where there is also a lot of violence, people live in state 1. Furthermore, parents do not want to care for their children anymore (they said that 10 year old children were outside at 1am), instead—as I already mentioned on Dorji Wangchuk’s blog—they hope that the state does their work which will lead to more problems instead of solutions in my opinion. Yet, I also have to admit that exactly this system is proposed and installed by the state: They want mothers to send their children to a crèche instead of stopping work for some years and caring for the children.

Demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg

In Berlin, the police must think the same about the demonstrants of Berlin-Kreuzberg. In 1987 demonstrations of left-wing extremists and antifa (antifascism, yet extremists too) became to severe and police had to retrieve for a while from Berlin-Kreuzberg. Since then left-wing extremists are coming to Kreuzberg each year and cause street fights with the police.

Each year there are injured policemen and injured demonstrants. I do not want to judge about either of them here, because both of them can be very friendly and also very rude, but I think it must suck for some policemen to work there. They have to fight against people they might even support, because police service hasn’t become better within the past few years. Government puts trust in surveillance cameras instead of people and thus does not hire so many policemen anymore (they cannot be dismissed, because they are public officials). Thus, policemen have to face a lot of work and might get overworked easily, which also leads to overreaction in some cases.

At first, I guess I have to say that I do not want to put Germany down, but instead try to rise China’s image in our Western culture a bit. You will see that I can only do this with regards to you the people, because the German government will still consider my assumptions totally wrong.

The State Defending Itself

We have to consider what the state’s own aim is and come to the conclusion that it always means self-defension and self-preservation. This is usually written in constitutions in such words as that the consitution might not be abolished or similar.

The Basic Law for Germany (our constitution) mentions that each step against the liberal democratic order is to be considered illegal and must be punished. Thus, the communist party was called illegal in 1956, mainly because of the conflicts with the GDR. The GDR was a socialistic state and like a child of the UdSSR. This socialistic approach was too much for West Germany and they wanted to prevent themselves from a putsch as seen in other countries around the world, e.g. Afghanistan some years later (1978) which was supported by the UdSSR then.

We know that the prohibition of something always has to do with fear. Government is afraid of a takeover and wants to strike down each chance of hostile win. This approach cannot only be seen in—as our media always mentions—“evil countries”, but also in Germany as soon as something seems dangerous enough to harm the state.

Sovereign States

Of course, there are differences between Germany and China on how much people are allowed to say against the state, but we have to go one step backwards to see the whole incident more general.

Both China and Germany are sovereign states and thus have full rights to act on their own territory as they want to do, however since they both joined the United Nations they have to adapt to some rules and guidelines of the United Nations. Yet, I do not want to discuss the pros and cons of United Nations and its rules here, but instead I want to follow the image of sovereign states.

As a sovereign state each state wants to impose its rules on the people and also continue these rules, especially the form of government. This means that Germany is willing to maintain its pluralistic democracy with many parties while China is willing to hold a one-party-system.

Perspective on Democracy

Germany and China have their own methods to do this, but both of them are forbidding communcation with the enemy or criticism. Germany allows more criticism, but becomes strict when it comes to terrorism. There are some cases nowadays in which people are accussed for having supported terroristic organisations. This is in my eyes not different from the Chinese point-of-view of supporting the opposition, just because of the different views on politics.

Germany wants—as already mentioned—different parties and thus also opposition, while China needs only one party. Therefore, Germany is not able to forbid opposition, but they can forbid other opposing organisations who are against the democratic order. This is pretty much the same as China’s prohibition of opposition. While in Germany we need the opposition, but we do not need people who are against our form of democracy, China does not need groups who are against their form of democracy either (and since they have only one party, they also do not need other parties).

We can see that from the perspective of each state’s comprehension of democracy (Germany: a posteriori; China: a priori) we can understand the prohibition of other opinions and see that both states have their reasons for forbidding other opinions and especially why China is not as evil as it is shown in Germany. They just have another comprehension of demcracy and German media or politics only analyzes China’s acting from our point-of-view.

The German eduction system is highly differentiated with regards to the 16 Länder—at least on school level. University level is country-wide the same and thus not so difficult, even though there are several institutions for tertiary education.

School System: Primary and Secondary Education

German students begin going to elementary school at an age of 6 or 7 having spent about 3 years at an optional kindergarten before. They will learn according to study plans which have been made by the government of each Land. However, there often are mandatory topics and optional topics which the teacher can choose from.

This is very the complicated aspects begin. Each Land has its own rules on how school will go on and how students will learn further. While there are some Länder where students learn together six years other already separate them after four years. Furthermore, in some Länder the teacher’s opinion on which school a student will be allowed to visit is mandatory, in some it is only an advice.

When you are attending a new school after fourth or sixth grade, there are three different possibilites:

• Hauptschule (9 years)
• Realschule (10 years)
• Gymnasium (12 / 13 years)

Thus, the students are highly separated according to their knowledge and behaviour which in my opinion leads to an amplification of effects, meaning that the bad students will become worse for they have no contact to good students and the good students will lose sight for the not so intelligent people’s views.

Hauptschule is the lowest level of German school system and often considered very poor. Especially in cities the people there are pretty underbred not knowing German values, because already their parents—and of course also their other class mates in school—do not care about them. Different people already wanted to abolish Hauptschule in order to send all these students to Realschule, but at least in Baden-Württemberg (where I live) these attempts have been stopped by the government. After having finished Hauptschule you can go to a Werkrealschule to get the same degree you would get at Realschule.

In the past Realschule has been seen as the normal way of eduction, but I guess with increasing education and the need for university degree it has changed a bit towards people wanting their children to go to Gymnasium. However, even if you have only been on Realschule, you can always attend a non-general-education Gymnasium afterwards for three years. Moreover, there are other schools you can attend which will give you an advanced technical college entrance qualification (you cannot enter universites with this) or a general qualification for university entrance.

Gymnasium is the highest level of these three school systems and it always lasted 13 years altogether, but for younger it’s only 12 years. Of course, they have more lessons per week instead. In 10th class you will get the same degree you would get with Realschule and you might change to a non-general-education Gymnasium (e.g. an economy-specialized Gymnasium). After 12/13 years students will get the general qualification for university entrance.

Advanced Technical College (Fachhochschule) / University: Tertiary Education

Once you got the approriate degree of either advanced technical college entrance qualification or general qualification for university entrance you can enter a Fachhochschule or university. However, we do not only have normal university education here, but also academdia (I think especially in arts), so called Berufsakademie or combined studies (Duales Studium).

In Berufsakademie and combined studies you learn at university and go to a company together. Of course not at exactly the same time, but combined studies can switch between both forms of education within one week or even one day. Berufsakademie usually uses intervals of several months of theory followed by several months of internships in a company.

With regard to the distinction between Fachhochschule and university I can only say that Fachhochschule is said to be more practical while university is said to be more theoretical. Therefore, some people told me that at university you rather focus on how something works (e.g. algorithms) while Fachhochschule focuses more on how you can use it. Actually, you  can not distringuish it so easily, because of course everything is part of each of the systems. Yet, I think that universities really do not have mandatory internships as often as Fachhochschule, which supports the argument that Fachhochschule is more oriented on practice.

And now everything in Graphics

Since the whole system is not really easy to understand, I will show you a good figure found on bildungsserver.de.

PS: Excuse-me for not having written so long, but being part of the German education system I had to participate in some exams on July 15th–21st.

I always wondered why each generation had some historical point of change when they had to fight for the new age, not having been able to recognize that we also have such a situation in our current world. Either being to young or only seeing daily politics, I was not able to see the deeper events in our current world and connect them to a whole string of conflicts.

It is not only about a world between free speech and censorship, between big trust companies and individuals, between national identity and globalization, but rather the fight between isolation and participation. I do not speak of US’s interventionism (you could call it “participation”) and isolation policy which changes each few decades, I am talking about the participation of individual persons in different processes.

These processes do influence both economcy and politics, which includes two different processes in current world who also affect each other.

From Hierarchy to Diversity

In the former world, there have been clear hierarchies: On the top there was a company owner, a politician or somebody else who made his way up. He gave the instructions and the people followed his orders, liking or not liking them. There were discussions, but due to the one-way structure of communication back then it was not possible for normal people to influence the processes.

With the introduction of Internet into daily world, it became possible to post one’s own opinion online and to discuss with other people. The citizens become more self-assured and want to influence political discussions. This can clearly be seen at the young generation, often refered to as digital natives, because they grew up with the Internet.

What we see now in both economical and political conversations is the collision of these two different worlds. On the one side there are the older people who are used to one-way structures from top down, which enabled them to make people follow their wills when they had some new ideas. These people are not used to discussions with their voters or customers and they cannot adapt to the new order very well.

OpenGovernment / eGovernment

While some of these digital natives are claiming for eGovernment the German government is preparing its own definition. This definition does not include public information as demanded by OpenGovernment, but only APIs for application forms. The government does not care about privacy either, as ELENA shows.

ELENA is a project to force companies to use an electronical system to submit information about employees to the state. This system stores much more information than needed and it is a pressure for many company owners. Instead of removing the whole law again, our government now wants to discuss if it is possible to continue the old system for small and medium-sized businesses which would make the whole process even more complicated.

If you ask politicians about eGovernment they think it is just about enabling people to fill out a form via Internet. Most of them never thought about providing data in machine readable format via the Internet. You have to be happy in Germany if information is even available in human-readable format and you can find it. US’s data.gov and UK’s data.gov.uk are first attempts to create such databases with governmental data, but they are not as much readable by machines as possible.

Why Freedom is Not Certain

Censorship vs. Freedom of Information

We also face the conflict between censorship and freedom of information once again—or rather as always. Government has to decide whether it wants to stop the liberal and anarchical structure of the internet and establish a control organisation. Of course, each sovereign state’s laws are already valid on the Internet, but since the Internet is global it sometimes is really difficult to enforce these laws.

The in Germany and Europe over and over repeated argument that child pornography should be blocked is a very poor example, because almost every state where servers contain child pornography has laws against it. It’s thus obviously only an argument used to disable any criticism. Better examples could include the hosting of nazi websites in the US, even though I do not know any numbers there, but I guess you know what I mean. While Germany forbids nazi propaganda, it is part of free speech in the US. There are different laws in different states and this could be a reason to destroy the Internet’s international architecure.

However, it is probable that—just like in the past on the way from absolitism to democracy—we will face other structures in the future. The world is becoming more and more complex and we have to begin understanding that not everything can be described unidirectional. Considering that we also rule more on a supra-national level it would be logical that also some laws concerning international communcation and interaction will reach such a level (e.g. photography laws and distribution).

We also see discussion about freedom of information within each single state. Wikileaks has published a video of the US army which showed the death of two journalists in Iraq. Reuters, who they worked for, was not able to get access to the video even though there is a Freedom of Information Act in the US. Officials often argue that specific pieces of information were classified and important for national security. We also see such reasoning when asking German institutions about data: they often claim that this information was not for the public.

Copyright infringements

You might also recognize that copyright owners are suing as many people as they can and they always complain about their decrease of income. They are demanding stricter rules which are currently discussed by many states—totally intransparently—in ACTA. Even the European Parliament having the right to get informed about all discussions of the European Commission has not seen the draft, yet.

On this field we have the choice between strengthening the major companies or making knowledge public and allowing everybody to use it. Some people say that copyright should be the exception and public domain normal arguing that copyright is a unnateral state stopping people from working together. The flood of patents and patent claims (often by companies who do nothing else but owning patents and suing other companies ten years later), by the way, belongs to the same category.

Will We All Become Transparent?

Moreover, we are facing the discussion between privacy and transparency. While the Internet creates the chance of gathering much information and restructuring and analysing it, there are warnings arising that we will become too transparent.

Still, we have to see that there are also a lot of advantages we get from these services. Ibrahim Evsan of sevenload separates the web services according to their size and their desire for highness of information and calls some of them digital superpowers. Seeing the problem that Germany was too shy in the new field of Internet and politics was too slow, he also explains why all of these digital superpowers come from the US. He also mentions that our current copyright laws do not fit the internet which is part of the conflict between censorship and freedom.

Of course, you can help yourself by altering between search engines instead of only using Google (which is also valid for other services) and watching out which services belong to the same company (e.g. flickr to Yahoo). We cannot achieve full privacy—just as in real life where we communicate with other people—but we can solve the problem on our own without the influence of the state, I guess.

This also shows again that the web will just contain diversified contents and we will have to learn how to deal with it ourselves. We cannot rely on the state and hope that it will show us which one is the right way, otherwise we have to return to absolutism.

Since a document from the CIA giving information on how to convince the German people of the mission in Afghanistan has been leaked I want to dive further into the German consitution, called Grundgesetz and its effects on the German army.

We will read several articles concerning the Bundeswehr and its rights and duties.

Bundeswehr as Defense Army

The German army is defined as a defense army in the Grundgesetz. The beginning of article 87a says:

(1) The Federation shall establish Armed Forces for purposes of defense. Their numerical strength and general organizational structure must be shown in the budget.

(2) Apart from defense, the Armed Forces may be employed only to the extent expressly permitted by this Basic Law.

We will have a closer look on these exceptions later, but at first let’s concentrate on the defensive aspects.

Due to the deeds of Germany in the past, we have an article forbidding each attempt to start an attack on another state. Each attempt to plan a war of aggression is unconstitutional and illegal. This is stated in article 26:

(1) Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense.

(2) Weapons designed for warfare may be manufactured, transported, or marketed only with the permission of the Federal Government. Details shall be regulated by a federal law.

Thus, Germany army is not allowed to attack at first, but these statements seeming so easy are complicated and can be eroded easily. The German army takes part in international interventions if specific regions are said to be a danger for world peace and the missions are considered to have positive influence on peace.

Germany as Part of International Organizations

Article 24 deals with international organizations and contains the following sentence:

(2) With a view to maintaining peace, the Federation may enter into a system of mutual collective security; in doing so it shall consent to such limitations upon its sovereign powers as will bring about and secure a lasting peace in Europe and among the nations of the world.

This means Germany’s army will not act only upon the German will, but also as part of international organizations like NATO. An example for such an incident was the terrorist attack on the USA. As soon as the UN Security Council confirmed the collapse of the US twin towers as being an attack on a member state, Germany was supposed to support the NATO.

Germany does not necessarily have to send troops, but it should help in a way the state finds suitable. Not helping could lead to the problem that, if there is an attack on Germany, other states will not act, either.

Since the UN Security Council claimed there was danger for world peace, the Bundeswehr was able to act based upon a state of defense (even though the whole mission is an out of area operation).

However, Germany is not only part of the NATO, but also—as member of the European Union—member of Europe’s Common Defense and Security Policy (CDSP). Even though it works closely together with the NATO, there still are distinctions and separated work groups. The CDSP is mainly focused on war prevention and peace keeping operations.

The German army also supports the so called UN standby-arrangment-system (UNSAS): a list with states deploying soldiers who can be sent to operational areas within 30 to 90 days.

Usage of Army within Germany

Article 35 and article 87a allow the state to use the army within Germany, but only very rarely. You can usually say that army is only allowed to become active within Germany if all other groups have failed.

Article 35 deals with natural catastrophes and allows the army to help if wider regions are influenced and non-military institutions (like police and fire brigade) cannot solve it on their own.

(3) If the natural disaster or accident endangers the territory of more than one Land, the Federal Government, insofar as is necessary to combat the danger, may instruct the Land governments to place police forces at the disposal of other Länder, and may deploy units of the Federal Border Police or the Armed Forces to support the police. Measures taken by the Federal Government pursuant to the first sentence of this paragraph shall be rescinded at any time at the demand of the Bundesrat, and in any event as soon as the danger is removed.

In Germany, such catastrophes usually mean floods. I have a picture in mind where Bundeswehr piled up sandbags to stop the water, but I cannot remember which flood that was.

Article 87a allows the usage of army in states of defense and danger for democracy. However, all these operations are only allowed as long as both Bundestag and Bundesrat tolerate them and if police and Federal Border Police were not able to solve the problem on their own:

(3) During a state of defense or a state of tension the Armed Forces shall have the power to protect civilian property and to perform traffic control functions to the extent necessary to accomplish their defense mission. Moreover, during a state of defense or a state of tension, the Armed Forces may also be authorized to support police measures for the protection of civilian property; in this event the Armed Forces shall cooperate with the competent authorities.

(4) In order to avert an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order of the Federation or of a Land, the Federal Government, if the conditions referred to in paragraph (2) of Article 91 obtain and the police forces and the Federal Border Police prove inadequate, may employ the Armed Forces to support the police and the Federal Border Police in protecting civilian property and in combating organized armed insurgents. Any such employment of the Armed Forces shall be discontinued if the Bundestag or the Bundesrat so demands.

In 2008 or 2009, there have been plans of our former Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble to extend the rights of the army within the state, but these have been stopped by demonstrants and probably also oppositional politicians.