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the German nation, literally the assemblage of the nation. No crown, no strong presidency compete with it in this respect as they do in Paris, London, or Washington. Ever since the Second Empire, it has been regarded as the instrument of democratization. No other national institution in Germany is popularly elected, like the French or American presidents.
In the one-hundred and forty year history of national parliaments in Germany, the concept of the
"parliamentarization" of the Government played an important role. Meant by it was the transformation of the executive branch of government from a set of civil servants headed by a Chancellor appointed by the Emperor (or, later, by the President) into a government selected by and from Parliament and subject to parliamentary dismissal. "Parliamentarization" in this sense developed in the final years of the Second Empire, had a fatally ambiguous status in the Weimar Republic, and has been firmly established throughout the forty years of the Bundestag. As we have seen, the cabinet in the Federal Republic is composed of men and women who are members of the Bundestag, shaped by their experience in it. The long historical process of parliamentarization, first intended to tame the constitutional monarchy, then fatally derailed within the naively democratic terms of the Weimar constitution, has been firmly established in the Federal Republic under constitutional and practical arrangements that show the marks of history.
The specialized committee system on which the Bundestag depends originated in the separation of powers during the Empire, reminiscent of the separation of powers in the United States and quite unlike the fusion of powers in France and the United Kingdom. Yet the committees do not have the power of U.S. congressional committees precisely because the German and American separation of powers had different historical origins. The Bundestag also has its own leadership separate from the party leaders in the cabinet, more like the leadership of the U.S. Congress than of the British House of Commons, but once again the distinctive consequence of the separation of powers in the Second Empire. The parliamentary party leaders do not have the autonomy of their American counterparts.
The relationship in which the Bundestag stands to the Bundesrat originated in the particular pattern by which the German states were unified in the second third of the last century. In an increasingly centralized political system it therefore shares with the Bundesrat control over the terms of that centralization.
Part of the situation of the Bundestag is the product of quite recent German history. Its relationship to the Constitutional Court is a postwar expression of German legal