From state weakness as strength to state weakness as weakness : welfare corporatism and the private use of the public interest

The paper is a contribution to a book edited by Simon Green and Willie Paterson, Semi-sovereignty Revisited: Governance, Institutions and Policies in United Germany. The book will appear in 2003 or 2004. It explores to what extent Peter Katzenstein's seminal study of the "semi-sovereign" German state in the 1980s is still valid. The paper looks at one of the showpieces of Katzenstein's theory of beneficial semi-sovereignty, German industrial relations, and follows their development from the Modell Deutschland of the 1976 election campaign to Schröder's Bündnis für Arbeit. It comes to the conclusion that as far as Germany is concerned, the days are gone when it was an advantage for the governance of industrial relations to have a weak state.