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-->THE WALL STREET JOURNAL September 21, 2005; Page A10

BERLIN -- In some ways, Germany's post-election political mess is the fault of the Americans.

Germany's disarray partly stems from the country's unique political system. No part of the government is strong enough to push through controversial measures, such as economic overhaul, without wide consensus. That is the way the U.S. deliberately set things up after World War II, to prevent the rise of another Hitler.

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Germany's own version of federalism, in which the states and central government have largely overlapping responsibilities and regularly thwart each other, stems from the way the U.S. occupation army chose to build democracy.

Lt. Gen. Lucius D. Clay, America's viceroy in Germany after the Nazi surrender, was charged with shaping the new government. He got little guidance from Washington beyond a U.S. Treasury paper titled"Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III." It proposed reducing the whole German economy to farming.

Lt. Gen. Clay didn't go that far, but to make life difficult for any future dictators he exploited Germany's history of rival local principalities. He oversaw the creation of Germany's regional governments -- some of them based on historical kingdoms and others made up -- and handed powers to them, rather than to national parties.

Then the state representatives, when writing the constitution, made sure a majority of them could veto moves by the federal government.

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