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The Obstacles to Social Integration in the Reunified Germany: Reflections on the Political Issues

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1국민대학교

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ABSTRACT

Even 20 years later after the rapid reunification, few Germans would agree that the state of unity has been actually been achieved. Many Germans regret that German unification took place without enough consultation of political issues, benefitting from a more consensus based decision-making process. The main purpose of this research is to examine what Germans have learned by trial and error as this article details why they had not referred to the merits of consensus democracy that probably might let structural transitions be made from unification to integration at a lower price and what constitutional values and wishes have lacked in the reunification process, from the political, economic, and cultural perspectives. The most important goal of the German reunification was to create the equal living conditions for all citizen with equal rights in the east and west. Equal civil rights means that all citizens have equal access to all political processes and comprehensive social ones. However, the journey to achieve genuine social integration has taken longer than expected because the attempts to achieve the independent and equal participation in many parts of social institutions faced a lot of resistance. In reality, equal opportunities have not been legally guaranteed for East Germans, and thus there exist differences in the living conditions of the East and West German residents. That has become the major barrier to social integration since the reunification of the East and West Germany. Considering the fact that one of the typical characteristics of German political culture was the ideology of ‘legal state’(‘Rechtsstaat’ in German), the belief of ‘legal state’ itself - the belief that state founded on the rule of law automatically guarantees civil rights - must be a fallacy with German characteristics.

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