The Tax State Between the Poles of Democracy and Capitalism. A History of Public Finance in West Germany (1949-1989)

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Marc Buggeln
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 287897891

Politics nearly always revolves around fiscal policy. After all, revenues make it possible to shape the state in the first place and distributing these collected funds in an appropriate manner is one of the main objectives of government activity. While these decisions influence the future sustainability of a society, taxes and transfers are also one of the key means of redistributing wealth. They have always been steeped in controversy and remain the subject of battles over resource distribution in society. While democracy is based on the promise of equality for all citizens, market economy mechanisms continuously generate inequality. Hence, taxes and transfers are an important means of striking a balance between the conflicting tendencies of democracy and capitalism. My work focuses on state fiscal policy in order to study what attempts were made to achieve this balance in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1989.The relatively long period under study was selected to show how the government reacted to different situations and which fiscal policies proved successful or unsuccessful under the given circumstances. I pursue here an approach that focuses on the actors to analyze the relationship between the structural conditions of a given situation and the diversity or the limited nature of the options available to the leading individuals of the day. The study focuses in a traditional manner on the nation-state. After all, tax and budget policy remain a national affair. At the same time, I examine the transfer and comparative processes, since politicians, ministerial bureaucrats and various lobbyists nearly always made comparisons with conditions in other Western European countries and the USA when it came to key decisions. Consequently, some of the main changes in the Federal Republic of Germany were driven by developments abroad.The current crisis has made state finances the focal point of public debates. Scientific works on the crisis stem from economists who primarily quantify their work with the latest figures, while historic works on state finances in Germany since 1945 are largely lacking. My work aims to help decipher the genealogy of the present and initiate further contemporary historical research into the fiscal policy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants