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Konfliktlösung im Bundesstaat : die Lösung föderaler Kompetenz-, Finanz- und Territorialkonflikte in Deutschland, den USA und der Schweiz

This book, “Conflict Resolution in Federations”, resulted from five years of intensive research encompassing a relatively comprehensive and comparative constitutional analysis of 723 pages, covering Germany, the United States and Switzerland, with a view towards a wider application. Each country perspective in itself incurred more work than a regular journal article, not to mention the overall conclusions drawn from these. This book, which also constitutes my German post-doctoral Habilitation thesis, was my main research focus from 2007-2012, which substantially limited my ability to produce other outputs, in particular, long, scholarly articles for peer reviewed journals.

This book analyses how federations solve the inherent conflicts between different levels of government regarding distribution of competencies, financial authority and territorial sovereignty. Comparing Germany, the United States and Switzerland, it identifies different styles of conflict resolution characterized by their respective use of formal constitutional amendments, constitutional court adjudication, means of compulsion, and more informal means of conflict resolution based on negotiations within various institutional contexts. While accepting a certain path dependency once a federal system is created, the author concludes by suggesting legal reform with relevance to the current discussion on federalism in Germany and beyond.