WEST GERMAN TRADE UNIONS: THEIR DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN POLICIES,

German unions, though numerically strong and presently operating under favorable conditions, are facing a number of handicaps. They suffer from a lack of dynamic leadership, and are weighted down by the burdens of the German political past. Both German tradition and present power configurations serve to make the unions insecure about their place in the present governmental setup. Consequently, they try to operate both as representatives of labor in the context of present-day capitalist institutions, and as a force seeking to add economic to political democracy. They consider labor as the only true custodian of democracy, and they mistrust both the state apparatus and their industrial opposite numbers. Their relations with both suffer from the fact that, in Germany, political notions evolving around the state as a repressive authority never yielded to concepts of the state as a dynamic expression of community life with ample latitude for divergent political and social forces.