CHAPTER IV. Parliamentary Government

PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT

A democracy, above all one comprising seventy million inhabitants, no matter to what great extent it makes use of direct government, cannot nevertheless govern itself that way. It must furnish itself with representatives charged with the direction of public affairs. Democracy presupposes by definition a representative government.

But this government may assume different aspects, and the republic--for we have seen that the republic is the normal form of democratic government--may be organized according to three different principles.

There may be noted, according to the type, the presidential republic, such as the United States of America, which tends to realize a separation of powers as complete as possible and in which the President elected by the people and his ministers or secretaries nominated by the President are never responsible to the Parliament. Then there is the collegiate republic, such as Switzerland and the Hanseatic Cities, in which the President is replaced by a college which is, by the side of the Parliament, an organ of popular sovereignty and which exercises executive powers. This college is elected by the popular representative body and depends on it. Finally there is the parliamentary republic, such as exists in France.

We know what makes up parliamentary rule. Here also legislative power and executive power are separated and are to a certain measure independent. But the two cannot exercise their functions except when in co-operation. On the one hand, a certain separation; on the other, a certain co-operation, co-operation of separate and independent powers. The functioning of this system is insured by a very simple mechanism. The president names his ministers but these ministers cannot begin functioning or remain as such until they have obtained the confidence of the national representative body. The day that these ministers lose this confidence they also lose their power. Parliament does not only exercise legislative power therefore; it also controls executive action. The chief of states names his ministers, but he has not the liberty to appoint them. He must take those designated by the majority of the Chamber and reject them when they are discarded by the Chamber.

It is this last system that the German Constitution has chosen. One may express surprise thereat. For has not Germany been the classic ground for pleasantries over “parliamentary cretinism”? However, it has chosen parliamentarism. To use the words of Member of the Reichstag Koch, “The best form of expression of democracy is parliamentarism. We know of no other form superior to it and we have consequently decided to make parliamentarism one of the foundations of the new edifice.”

Now, the mechanisms which the Constitution has instituted, and through which the parliamentary system must function, are--either because of the federal form of the State, or because of new ideas which it has introduced in its creation--more numerous and more complicated than in most other countries. There is a Reichstag, a President, a Cabinet, a Reichsrat, and an Economic Council.

This last will be studied in the section of this book devoted to the Economic Constitution. In the present chapter we shall study the other organs, and shall inquire in what measure they are capable of insuring and do insure in fact to Germany the parliamentary government which it has chosen.