ABSTRACT
Paraphrasing the medieval custom regarding kings, some students of Germany today are tempted to cry, The Republic is dead. Long live the Republic!’ Whether the Bonn Republic is really ‘dead’ and has been replaced by the Berlin Republic is, in fact, not all that clear. Evidence exists both for and against the thesis. With respect to German federalism, a case can certainly be made that there have been a rather large number of changes since unification in October 1990 and that many if not most of these are due at least in part to the impact of unification. Whether these constitute a new federal system or merely some adjustmentssome of which are rather significant-remains to be seen. The purpose of this paper is to review briefly some of the most important changes in the German federal system and to provide an analysis of their effects.
