“Interagency Processes in the Federal Republic of Germany: Dynamics Towards Growth, Differentiation and Fusion”

The German administrative mechanisms which connect government, administrations and governmental agencies with Brussels have a low reputation: the conventional wisdom among academics (Sasse 1975, Regelsberger and Wessels 1984; Bulmer and Paterson 1988; Bulmer, Jefferey,, and Paterson 1998; Janning and Meyer 1998) identifies a low degree of competitiveness. Compared to their French (Lequesne 1996) and British (Armstrong and Bulmer 1996) counterparts the performance of the German interagency process suffers from horizontal and vertical fragmentation, old-fashioned and cumbersome procedures and institutional pluralism if not “cannibalism,” “negative co-ordination”(Scharpf 1997) and Politikverflechtung-“political interwovenness” or “interconnectedness” (Scharpf 1985). Those features highlight a lack of forceful strategies, late preference building and position taking and-as a result-to minority positions in the Council of Ministers. To get an impression for the complexity we should look at the constitutional and legal bases: Articles 23 and 65 of the Basic Law and subsequent laws, agreements and rules of procedure between the different branches of the Federal Government, but also between the Länder, the Bundesrat and Bundestag on the one hand and the Federal Government on the other, which altogether form a “fine-tuned” piece of balancing different interests for the characteristics of participation and power