Political Framework

Germany, reunified in 1990, is a federal republic with 16 states. The largest are North Rhine-Westphalia in the west and Bavaria in the south. The smallest are Saarland and the city states Hamburg and Bremen. The German capital Berlin also has the status of a federal state.

Because political centralism was regarded as an essential factor for an authoritarian state – as experienced by Germany during the era of the empire and especially during the National Socialist dictatorship (1933-1945) – the declared will of the Federal Republic of Germany was the re-establishment of decentralised structures. At the same time this decentralisation was perceived as a way of preserving the regional diversity in Germany that had evolved through the centuries. The German constitution consequently stipulates that the states have autonomy in a range of political functions and with regard to large sections of the national legislature. Thus, each of the 16 states has its own parliament, government and ministries as well as its own police force. Germany's federal structure is particularly apparent (and in the European context also problematic) in the education system: each state has its own education laws and reaches its own decisions regarding the form, organisation and priorities of universities, the school system and the curricula. While there is a national conference of state ministers of education and the arts (Conference of Arts and Education Ministers, KMK) that tries to coordinate the states' education policies in an elaborate political and bureaucratic process and produces structural directives especially for international tasks, educational policy in Germany is nevertheless characterised more than anything else by regional and structural disparity.