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The Social Democratic-led government called elections on 19 January 1919 for a National Assembly that would give Germany a new constitution. On 11 August 1919, the democratic Weimar Constitution was promulgated. It provided for a Reich president whose powers were similar to those of the former emperor as limited by the October constitutional ...
On 28 October, the Reichstag passed constitutional reforms that changed Germany into a parliamentary monarchy. The chancellor and his ministers were made dependent on the confidence of the parliamentary majority rather than the emperor, and peace treaties and declarations of war required the Reichstag's approval. [ 36 ]
The Prussian Reform Movement was a series of constitutional, administrative, social, and economic reforms early in 19th-century Prussia. They are sometimes known as the Stein–Hardenberg Reforms, for Karl Freiherr vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg, their main initiators.
The leadership of the MSPD had seen its long-standing demands for a democratization of the Reich addressed by the October 1918 constitutional reforms. [2] The amendment to Constitution of the German Empire turned the German Reich into a parliamentary monarchy in which the government was no longer answerable to the emperor but to the majority in the Reichstag.
The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany [1] (Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland) is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.. The West German Constitution was approved in Bonn on 8 May 1949 and came into effect on 23 May after having been approved by the occupying western Allies of World War II on 12 May.
The constitution emphasizes the protection of individual liberty in an extensive catalogue of human and civil rights and divides powers both between the federal and state levels and between the legislative, executive and judicial branches. West Germany was a founding member of the European Community in 1958, which became the EU in 1993.
The leadership of the largest party in the Reichstag, the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), and especially its chairman Friedrich Ebert, saw the party's main goal as already having been achieved by the constitutional reforms and believed that the Empire's elites would come to terms with democratisation if Germany remained a monarchy. [4]
Two days later, the October constitutional reforms changed the German Empire from a constitutional to a parliamentary monarchy. By leaving the emperor in supreme command of the military and with the right to appoint the government, the revised constitution did not go far enough to fulfil the American conditions. [20]