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mobility and distributive tensions that followed meet the exogeneity condi-
tion: they do not exclusively reflect the distributive impact of pre-existing fiscal
structures.
3
Similarly, Reunification as a historical process is largely the result of the
sudden redrawing of Europe's political map, and not a response to the way
the fiscal system in the Federal Republic had been operating up to that point.
Again, the latter is bound to be of significance to our understanding of the
way the new Germany responds to the many challenges posed by the process,
but that does not make it a cause of the process itself. It was the collapse of
the Soviet Union and, as a result, its system of satellite states that launched
the process and shaped Western Germany's approach to it. Indeed, it is com-
monly recognized that the coup in Russia in 1990 was a major factor in driving
western elites to speed up the process of incorporating Eastern Germany as
much as possible (Wiesenthal
1995
,
1996
). This decision, in turn, triggered an
overnight, and very extreme, alteration of Germany's economic geography and
potential patterns of mobility. The sudden economic union of two areas with
radically different levels of income, human capital, productivity, and pay cre-
ated the conditions for potential massive population outflows from the East and
increased the burden on the existing systems of interpersonal and interregional
redistribution (Streeck
2009
). As in the case of the North American federa-
tions, the distributive tensions associated with Reunification do not result only
from the preexisiting fiscal arrangements. Rather, they largely reflect political
choices imposed by external factors. In this sense, the German experience also
meets the exogeneity condition.
In contrast to these three experiences, the processes of European integration
and decentralization in Spain seem less straightforward. Notably, throughout
the history of European integration, all major alterations of the union's eco-
nomic geography result from enlargement decisions on which current mem-
bers have veto power. Though a careful look at the timing and sequence of
the enlargement decisions reveals a strong geopolitical impact again, enlarge-
ment negotiations were very much shaped by the distributive conflicts between
current and potential members (Schneider
2009
). This is particularly appar-
ent in the cases of Southern and Eastern Europe. Negotiations about inte-
gration for Portugal, Spain, and Greece started shortly after the latter tran-
sitioned to democracy. European powers at the time saw the integration of
these three countries as a necessary move toward the consolidation of their
new democratic institutions (Gunther, Diamandouros and Puhle
1995
). A con-
cern about the evolution and stability of three major players in the Mediter-
ranean flank of Europe was also in play at a time in which the end of the
Cold War was not nearly in sight. In turn, the prospect of opening the Union to
3
Obviously this does not rule out that, once in place, the eventual reorganization of the fis-
cal structure had a subsequent impact on regional inequalities and patterns of mobility. The
point to note here is that the Great Depression constitutes a breaking point that allows for the
identification of the causes underlying different responses.
