View Single Post
  #29   Report Post  
Old January 13th 14, 07:12 PM posted to uk.transport.london,misc.transport.urban-transit,uk.railway
Arthur Figgis Arthur Figgis is offline
external usenet poster
 
First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,147
Default Local Government Structures

On 13/01/2014 18:49, Charles Ellson wrote:
On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 18:14:27 +0000, Arthur Figgis
wrote:

On 13/01/2014 03:11, Charles Ellson wrote:

-Scotland would be chucked out of the EU (no competent ruling or
decision actually exists but e.g. Germany did not have to leave the EU
when re-forming as the EU just tailored appropriate arrangements)


Germany didn't re-form. The Laender in the Democratic Republic all
signed up for the Federal Republic's
not-quite-in-theory-but-in-practice-a-constitution, which had been
written with the specific aim of enabling this to happen at some point,
and thus the Laender became part of the Federal Republic. The current
Germany is actually "West Germany",

ITYM the German Federal Republic,


Which is what I wrote.

In case the names are confusing you, "West Germany" was an English
language colloquial term for the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (or, in
English, Federal Republic of Germany) pre-October 1990. This is the
country which still exists.

East Germany was a colloquial term for the Deutsche Demokratische
Republik (German Democratic Republic). This no longer exists, since its
constituent elements all joined the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (IIRC the
legal details for various parts of the urban area of Berlin were
technically slightly more complex, but that doesn't matter).

Presumably someone has thought about what to do if the governor of
Kaliningrad oblast were ever to come knocking on the Reichstag door
clutching a signed print-out of the basic law.

created in 1949 and to which the
Bundestag seems to refer in the present tense :-


Of course they refer to it in the present tense. Just as the Sejm refers
to the Rzeczpospolita Polska in the present tense.

but with more territory than it used to have.

Thus it physically reformed


No, it kept going on as before, but bigger. That is the point. I've
actually come across Germans who object to the English phrase "German
reunification", as from a German legal and constitutional perspective
that does not accurately reflect what happened.

along with all the EU-related consequences
of doing so. How many MEPs were there for GDR constituencies before
re-union ?


There never were any GDR(/DDR/East Germany/Soviet zone/whatever) MEPs.
See above.

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK