[notresidenter]

Are the states in Germany similar to the states in the US? I thought they were merely a relic of pre-WW1 unification, after the 1990 reunification, but that the states were just administrative entities with no independent sovereign power.

[KingOfCoders]

The states in Germany are basically US States 2.0 (in the sense of optimizing from learnings) as Germany is a federalist country like the US. Some taxes and adminstration is local (police, education, ...) and some is federal (other police, military).

Each state has a parliament ("Parlament"), a governour ("Ministerpräsident") and secretaries of state ("Minister"). Some states have a constitution (like Bavaria) and a supreme court (similar to states supreme courts in the US).

One difference for example, VAT is a federal rate, but both states and the federal system get money from it.

One difference that is always striking to me, judges in Germany are not elected, neither are the police, like sheriffs. There is not jail/prison difference.

The German "constitution" and setup (e.g. Germany has a Supreme Court, but not set by the president, and a "senate" and a "congress") was heavily inspired by the US system (e.g. compared to the French or British system) - the other driving force was a fear of a re-rise of the nazis. So some things got overfederalized, for example every state has it's own internal intellegence service (which hinders work a lot, but prevents a take-over of internal intellignce).

Some states are "pre-WW1", like Bavaria, most are not (only 4-5 out of 27 are). I live in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern which was several states and parts of Prussia "pre-WW1".

Eastern Germany had no states (for most of the time), so those states came into existence with reunification.

[phatfish]

Interesting, i didn't know about the "Bundesländer" having their own security services. Maybe that is why Germany has a reputation for poor security services as whole, as it is harder to direct resources. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing and makes sense given the history.

The UK started electing the head of the police service for each county, and it just becomes a politicized popularity contest with anaemic voter turnout, rather than having a competent person take the position.

At least we don't elect judges, which has an even worse effect of politicizing those tasked with interpreting and enforcing the laws concocted by politicians.

[notresidenter]

Thank you so much for such a detailed response, I'll go read more on the German system.

[antifa]

I think it'd be way more interesting if someone knew of a country the size of Germany that wasn't subdivided into smaller governments.