Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany

And why we did that, because with the new majorities in the Bundestag, We would not find the necessary majority, two-third majority, to change our constitution.

Also, with regard to the so-called debt break that we are having in our Grundgesetz, which is our basic law slash our constitution.

You know, this two-third majority, we wouldn't get that now to change that with the majority.

So anyway, so this is a situation, a lot of things are going on at the same time.

Social benefits are cut by law.

Deportations are organized with agencies that have long existed." The basic law, it's in capital, uh, is that something within, uh, Germany? The basic law has emergency powers.

American presidential practice has executive orders.

There is no point in this program for which one would have to abolish parliament.

Yeah.

Just a definition.

Basic law is the German constitution.

Yeah.

Their constitutions are not the same as our Constitution.

And so we cannot decide what our Constitution means by asking what is the meaning of some possibly similar provision in the Constitution of the French Republic or the, the, the basic law, the Constitution of Germany or the Constitution of Japan, et cetera.

You have a whole chapter on the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln.

Lincoln, who embraced the Declaration of Independence probably more than anybody.

He's, he's, he's making travels all across Europe at this time, um, working with, uh, working with what would later, elements that would later become Otto Remer's Socialist Reichspartei, which was, you know, the best way to describe it was almost exactly the Nazi Party immediately after, uh, Nuremberg, and it got, I think, something like thirty percent electoral support in the first election.

It, it was the, uh, first party banned by the German federal government under the joke of a constitution that is the Grundgesetz.

Um, but he, he makes acquaintance with Oswald Mosley and several of the, uh, former individuals within the British Union of Fascists.

Um, and in nineteen forty-eight, Yockey goes to Brittas Bay, Ireland, uh, a very isolated village with a single hotel, um, and i- over the course of, I think, a year, a little bit less than a year, without notes, writes that six hundred page paperback I believe you read, uh, Imperium, entirely from memory, entirely off the top of his head, and, um, takes it and presents it to, uh, Sir Oswald Mosley, and he says to him, "I will publish this under your name." And Mosley, um, kind of looks at him, and he, and he says, uh, "Thank you very much.

Whereas what happened was just open elections and the integration of East Germany into the structures of the Federal Republic.

He also thought that that the procedure was legally problematic because the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided to integrate East Germany using an article in the German Basic Law, so the West German Constitution.

that was designed to allow for the Tsarland to rejoin immediately after World War II.

Whereas there was a separate article in the German Basic Law that was actually sort of designed for to sort of be used when East Germany wanted to rejoin the West.

And that article actually called for a constitutional convention.

And so Habermas really thought that this kind of use of a kind of executive federalism and a kind of executive-led approach that short-circuited public conversation was really problematic.

On October 3, 1990, German reunification officially took effect, German Unity Day.

See Germany's Unification Treaty of August 31st, 1990, articles below.

So in abstract, the Unification Treaty was the result of intense negotiations between the GDR and the FRG.

It provided for the reorganization of the GDR's administrative districts, Berserk, into five federal states, Bundesländer, that would accede to the Federal Republic of Germany under the terms of Article 23 of the Basic Law.

and that the ambition and goal of a unified German state would be written into that because for fear of that permanent partition.

That is the very reason why the German constitution is not called German constitution, die deutsche Verfassung, but it's called das Grundgesetz.

Das

Grundgesetz.

Das

Grundgesetz.

Which translates to basic law.

Grundgesetz is like, Grund is ground, the grounding law.

Covered in Germany's constitution.

Article 37 of the basic law effectively says, uh, that on matters of national importance, uh, the national government can overrule, uh, the state governments.

Um, how this would be implemented, uh, particularly during a conflict, is a bit hard to guess.

Mm-hmm.

It also tells you who is even legitimately in the conversation to begin with.

And so the German method, you know, from the Grundgesetz was how do we not only decide who's won the election and who's the opposition, but how do we decide who's outside of the legitimate discourse? And what concerned the Germans in 1949 and onwards was basically how do you not repeat a situation as you had in the 1920s and early 1930s where the Communist Party and the Nazi Party were able to cause an enormous instability and essentially effect a veto over what any government did, even when it had a more broad basis of support.

So they had that complicated mathematical formula, which people like to quote and just say it's just a 5% threshold.

It's actually a little bit more complicated than a 5% threshold.