Exclusive right of representation

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Exclusive representation is the principle of a government to represent the population of a territory alone under international law, although another government, as a stabilized de facto regime, also has part of the territory and considers it to be its own territory.

Divided Germany

Federal Republic of Germany (until 1990)
From 1949 to 1969, the Federal Republic of Germany claimed sole representation for the entire German people. The claim was initially based on political legitimacy through free elections. In his statement to the German Bundestag on 21 October 1949, Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer stated this claim on the occasion of the entry into force of the Constitution of the German Democratic Republic. He received support at the New York Foreign Ministers Conference of the three Western powers on 18 September 1950. When the Soviet Union proclaimed the sovereignty of the GDR on 25 March 1954, the Bundestag unanimously claimed the sole representation of Germany.

At the Paris Conference, at which the revised Treaty on Germany and the incorporation of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO’s Western Defense Alliance were adopted in 1954, the allies adopted the view already confirmed by the three Western powers at the London Nine-Powers Conference that the Federal Republic alone was entitled to take action for the foreign policy of the German people. The Western world had thus accepted the claim of exclusive representation and had the West German government commit itself to a statement that limited its room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis Germany.

Legally, the claim was based on the view that the entire state of Germany (Germany as a whole) had been preserved. There could thus be no two German states; The GDR is only an occupied territory, in which there is a dictatorship, with a government established by the Soviet Union, therefore not autonomous, or should be regarded as a local de facto regime. According to another view, the Ministerial and State Council of the GDR opposed the “regular” German Federal Government and the Federal President as opponents in a state of civil war and were thus also not capable of recognition under international law. The umbrella state theory, which represented the view of the existence of two states under the umbrella of the never-defunct German Reich, was, however, only discussed in the late 1960s and finally in the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court of 31. July 1973, this theory was not clearly defined and contains elements of an identity thesis, since the Federal Republic of Germany as a subject of international law and thus a state remained identical with the German Reich; In West Germany, therefore, one moved away from the nuclear state theory and postulated a combined nuclear state theory.

In addition to international law