TNAG-2217-FCO40-3184-Constitutional-development-in-Hong-Kong-1991 — Page 49

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alter it. The accommodation that occurred between the established parties and the Greens was possible because of the existence of informal, impersonal, and nonpartisan norms. governing the application of the existing rules of procedure. These norms had evolved as customs and habits based on four decades of experience.

Although there was a dramatic increase in the number of times that the presiding officer had to call the members to order in the last half dozen years, that gentle sanction was generally sufficient to restore order, and the more draconian measures that had been needed to maintain order in the early years of the Bundestag were rarely called into play. Agreement on the agenda of the House by consensus in the Council of Elders continued to be reached in most instances. The length of debates and the distribution of debating time among the parties continued to be arranged by inter-party agreement, following norms of fairness governing different types of debates. While the length of some types of participation in debates was, by agreement, shortened, the right to ask follow-up questions was more generally recognized.

The experience of the last six years demonstrated that the unwritten rules of the House are so well related to the written rules that they are in the last resort formally enforceable. That means they are only rarely "tested. Furthermore, the unwritten rules are consistent with the interests of the minority as well as the majority: the minority's desire to get a full and fair hearing is amply provided, and the majority's insistence on prevailing in decisions is secured. The informal rules depend on a spirit of comity among the parliamentary leaders that exists across party lines and that reflects the common desire to permit the work of the Bundestag to be carried on. Even in the challenging nineteen eighties the maintenance of the informal norms of the Bundestag required only the patience of these leaders and, occasionally, their ability to be creative in the adaptation of the rules to the new four-party configuration. Thus the product of the Bundestag's first thirty-four years of experience served the most recent half-dozen years with impressive success. The result confirms the existence of both formal and informal rules, the capacity to apply them in a nonpartisan manner to new members as well as old, and an ability to adapt them to new situations in an orderly fashion. The second indication of the institutionalization of the Bundestag is therefore the stability of its distinctive rules of procedure, both those that are formally codified and those that express its "group life."

We come then to the third sign of the institutionalization of the Bundestag: the complexity of its organization and the dependence on the leadership of the House to make it work.

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