The German Federal Constitutional Court and the "Westintegration" of the Federal Republic of Germany (1951-1955)

• Applicant: Dr. Fabian Michl
• Subject Area: Public Law ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 545368235

The project examines the role of the German Federal Constitutional Court in the Westward integration of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1951 and 1955, focusing on the question of how politically the court acted in the eminently political questions of Westward integration and how its actions were evaluated by the genuine political actors. To this end, the project analyses the Court’s decisions on the Petersberg Agreement (1952) and the Franco-German Economic Agreement (1952), the EDC Treaty (1952/1953) and the Saar Statute (1955). While the Court has so far appeared to have been a largely passive institution that allowed Konrad Adenauer's foreign policy to take place, the project will examine the political motives for this stance and their constitutional implementation – for example through an implicit political-questions doctrine. It thus closes a research gap that has arisen due to the tendency to neglect constitutional jurisprudence in general historiography and the focus of constitutional history on the early fundamental rights jurisprudence of the Federal Constitutional Court. The project exploits the research potential offered by the recent opening up of court files. The basis is formed by the extensive archival records of the Federal Archives on the aforementioned court proceedings as well as the judges' private papers archived there. This core collection, which is being comprehensively evaluated for the first time for this project, is supplemented by the files of German and Allied (especially French) ministries and legislative bodies. The analytical framework for the evaluation of these archival resources is formed by the distinction between the production and presentation of judicial decisions: While the presentation in the reasons for decisions tends to conceal political motives in order to present the decision as a purely legal derivation, reconstruction and contextualization of the production process can bring these motives to light. These methods enable an informed constitutional-historical classification and evaluation, which the project is intended to provide for the decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court on Westward integration.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants