Vienna Final Act
The Vienna Final Act , also known as the Final Act of the Vienna Ministerial Conferences or Federal Supplementary Act , was a supplement to the German Federal Act , the constitutional treaty of the German Confederation . It was passed on November 25, 1819 and adopted by the Federal Assembly on June 8, 1820 .
history
After the further development of the federal act had been decided in 1815, the Karlsbad resolutions of 1819 stipulated that the foundations of the German Confederation should be determined more precisely at new conferences in Vienna . From these deliberations, which took place bypassing the Federal Assembly, the Vienna Final Act emerged on May 15, 1820. It was unanimously adopted by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt am Main on June 8, 1820 and passed as an equivalent second Federal Basic Law alongside the Federal Act of 1815. This gave the German Confederation its final constitutional form. In 1866 the German Confederation was dissolved and the Vienna Final Act lost its validity.
content
The Vienna Final Act was composed of 65 articles and increasingly expressed the politically and socially conservative intentions of the federal government. Its official title was: "Final Act of the Ministerial Conferences held in Vienna on the formation and consolidation of the German Confederation on May 15, 1820".
It stipulated that the federal government should be purely defensive in questions of war and peace : its task was "self-defense" and "maintaining Germany's independence and external security". For all states - with the exception of the city-states of Hamburg , Bremen , Lübeck and Frankfurt - the “monarchical principle” applied, according to which all power lay with the respective head of state (Article 57).
The federal government also reserved the right to intervene directly in the event of “open rioting” or “dangerous movements” in individual states (Article 26). In doing so, the German Confederation expressly secured a right to intervene to maintain the political and social status quo , as happened under the core states of the Holy Alliance - Russia , Austria and Prussia - for all of Europe.
The provision of Article 13 of the German Federal Act that state constitutions should apply in all federal states has not been specified more precisely in the sense of modern representations (Articles 53-61).
literature
- Fritz Hartung : German constitutional history . Teubner, Leipzig 1914
- Karl Binding : German constitutional laws . Felix Meiner publishing house, Leipzig 1913
- Hans Boldt : German constitutional history. Political structures and their change. Volume 2. dtv, Munich 1990. ISBN 3-423-04425-X
- Hartwig Brandt : The long way to democratic modernity. German constitutional history from 1800-1945. WBG, Darmstadt 1998. ISBN 3-534-06093-8
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wolfram Sieman: From confederation to nation state. Germany 1806-1871 . Munich, 1995, p. 333.