The New German Constitution

by René Brunet

Following the position which they took on this question, the members of the Committee on the Constitution supported either the text adopted by the conference of States or the project put forward by the government.

It became indispensable to know who in the last instance would decide on the territorial distribution. The conference of states replied, that only the states concerned should have the decision, otherwise there remains no such thing as states. The government insisted that it alone should be the deciding power, for it was the natural arbiter between the states, and only it controlled the situation sufficiently to resolve the problem in accordance with the political and economic considerations that were involved. Only the Reich can accomplish the necessary redistribution according to a consistent plan. Such a redistribution would have to be regulated by a law. A third current of opinion in this question came particularly from the champions of the creation of a Rhine republic, who pressed for the submission of the question of territorial redistribution to popular referendum and insisted that the will of the population thus expressed should be the ultimate guide for territorial redistribution.

After a preliminary examination of the question the committee to which it had been submitted presented a project according to which territorial changes would be regulated by a law, which, however, would have to be demanded either by the people involved or by a predominant general interest. It would be the Reich that would decide this in the last instance. Against this first project of the committee, objections were raised on March 29 by the states of south Germany; and negotiations began between the government, the representatives of these states and those of the majority parties. On May 29, a compromise was signed which, after slight alterations on June 5 by the Committee on the Constitution, provided that territorial changes must be accepted in principle by the states involved, and approved by the Reich. If the states refused their consent these changes could not be effected except by a law that took the form of a Constitutional provision; but this law could not be enacted unless the populations affected demanded it or unless the preponderant general interest required it. This new version increased the rôle of the states but also augmented the difficulty of procedure in any dismemberment whatsoever. It did not, however, exclude the hypothesis of a dismemberment effected in opposition to the wishes of the interested states.

The debate came back again and again to this version; and when the question reached the second reading before the National Assembly there was presented an amendment drawn up by Löbe of the Social Democrats, Trimborn of the Centre, and Heile of the Democrats, which after very much discussion among the government and the representatives of the states modified considerably the version of the Committee on the Constitution. On the one hand, territorial modifications were facilitated in the sense that new states could thereafter be created, even against the desires of the interested states, by a simple law; for they wanted to avoid, for example, the situation in which Prussia or another state could completely prevent all territorial modification by rendering impossible the necessary majority for the vote needed to enact a constitutional law. On the other hand, the creation of such a new state was rendered more difficult in the sense that it considerably complicated the conditions according to which the populations affected could express their desires. But most important of all—and that was the principal provision of the amendment—it was specified that no territorial change could be effected against the wish of the states concerned before a period of two years after the formal adoption of the Constitution.

Thus Prussia was guaranteed for at least two years against dismemberment.

This last provision was aimed at the Rhineland whose situation, as it was clearly indicated at the Assembly, was at the bottom of all the discussion. It was declared that the Rhineland needed above all tranquillity in the particular circumstances in which it found itself; that occupied by foreign troops it could decide its territorial needs only with difficulty; and that, above all, the creation of a state on the banks of the Rhine would be considered abroad as a preliminary to the complete independence of this state from the German Reich; and that it was “necessary to maintain a unity of front against French imperialism.” Along this line of argument it was further insisted that the dismemberment of Prussia has been the chief aim of the war waged by the enemies of Germany and the creation of a Rhenish Republic would be exploited by them as an additional victory. This resulted in the deputies from the Rhenish provinces declaring in the tribune of the Assembly their loyalty to the Reich and that whatever were their desires to see the Rhineland organized into a state, they would support the Löbe-Trimborn-Heile amendment including the postponement for two years of their justifiable claims.

The amendment was adopted by vote of 169 to 71, with 10 abstentions.

This version could not yet be considered as definitive, since when it came up for the third reading before the Assembly a new version was presented in the form of a new amendment by Löbe, Trimborn and Heile, which modified the original version. The changes proposed dealt with the method of calculating the majorities necessary in a popular vote to determine territorial changes. The Prussian Minister of the Interior Heine complained that the compromise previously adopted after such long debate had been modified at the last moment in the course of conferences to which the representatives of the states concerned had not been summoned. He preferred the original version; nevertheless he accepted the new one since he was convinced that the Constitution would have to be revised in several of its parts. He added several interesting declarations. It would be dangerous, he said, to seek to realize unity within the Reich by creating new states, which would almost immediately after have to abandon their newly won sovereignty and dissolve themselves into the Reich as a whole. That would be a useless detour. Heine pledged himself to facilitate the creation of the state of Thuringia and to give up to it a part of Prussian territory on the condition that prior to this a treaty would be enacted between that state and Prussia regulating the administrative and economic relations between the two. But he opposed with vigor the proposition to create the state of Upper Silesia and above all opposed the creation of a Rhenish Republic. This Republic, he pointed out, would unite the territories of the left bank of the Rhine occupied by the enemy and the territories of the right bank administered by Prussia. Such a union far from safeguarding the German spirit on the left bank would incur the risk of submitting the right bank to the same influences that prevailed on the other, and thus create a considerable danger of infection to the right bank.

Finally the Löbe-Trimborn-Heile amendment in its new version was adopted by the Assembly.

At the same time the Assembly passed a resolution which invited the Government to institute a central office where the different states would be represented; one which would have as its function to prepare programmes for regrouping the territory in accordance with a general plan. In July, 1920, a commission was formed in the Reichsrat with the consent of the states to devote itself to this task. The Minister of the Interior for the Reich, Koch, summed up its programme as “federation and decentralization.”