Suchergebnisse

Marcus Kreuzer's vigorously-argued essay on the progress of parliamentarization in Imperial Germany is an innovative intervention into a long-running scholarly debate about a central assertion of the Sonderweg thesis, namely the power or powerlessness of the democratically elected Reichstag of Imperial Germany. Plausibly dividing historians who have studied the topic into three groups: "optimists," who perceive a steady increase in parliamentary power and a move toward democratic and parliamentary government, particularly in the Wilhelmian Era; "pessimists," who deny the power of the Reichstag vis-à-vis the executive increased at any point in the history of the empire; and "skeptics" who point toward an increase in the power of the Reichstag, once again primarily in the Wilhelmian era, but deny that such an increase in power was leading toward democratic or parliamentary government. Kreuzer points out that underlying all three arguments is an implicit assumption of what a powerful parliament should be. Blinded by the "Westminster model" of British parliamentary government, he suggests, pessimists and skeptics have condemned the imperial Reichstag for not resembling the House of Commons. Yet the British governmental system represented just one possible form of parliamentarization. By systematically comparing the powers of the Reichstag with those of today's West European and North American legislatures, Kreuzer ascertains that the Reichstag was a politically influential parliament, thus demonstrating that the optimists have had the better of the argument about parliamentarization.