158 FRANK UEKÖTTER
problems. West Germany’s federalism made the task of turning new polit-
ical programs into a reality no less complicated than the socialist bureau-
cracy in the East. Implementation was about political jockeying. When
Genscher pressed ahead with his environmental agenda, for example, the
Bavarian Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare internally called for “the
most vocal resistance” because the initiative came from the other side
of the political aisle.^44 And it was about authority and jealously guarded
jurisdictions. By and large, the cooperation between the federal and state
levels was one of the thorniest issues within the West German system of
government, and it did not help that Genscher’s environmental policy
sought to expand the authority of the federal government at the expense
of the states. In his memoirs, Genscher wrote that “never before had a
minister tried to appropriate as much responsibility from the states in the
name of the federal government,” though he was still remorseful about
the “lost ‘water battle’”—that is, the fi ght for a stronger federal role in
water policy.^45 If there was an advantage for West Germany over the GDR
in matters of implementation, it was that the FRG could have an open
conversation over lackluster enforcement. Negligent implementation of
environmental legislation has been a running theme in West German de-
bates ever since a 1974 landmark report of the Expert Council for Envi-
ronmental Questions.^46 There was no similar rallying cry in the GDR, nor,
for that matter, a place to discuss implementation in public.
Environmental policy lost much of its thrust in West Germany when
Genscher moved on to the Foreign Ministry in 1974. In the same year,
a new chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, shifted the emphasis away from vi-
sionary plans to “realistic cost-benefi t calculations.”^47 Even decades later,
environmentalists were still talking about a closed-door meeting of the
government held at Gymnich Castle in June 1975 that signaled this turn-
ing of the tide.^48 And then there was the divisive debate over nuclear
power, where escalating protests and a hard-line government response
provoked situations akin to civil war. Another striking parallel: both Ger-
man states were remarkably stubborn when it came to nuclear power,
and they both made a mockery of state planning with dramatic bureau-
cratic blunders.^49 In the GDR, a former salt mine at Morsleben became a
deposit for radioactive waste in 1971, for example, but it was not granted
a permanent operation permit from the State Offi ce for Nuclear Safety
and Radiation Protection until 1986.^50 And Morsleben was still superior
in legal terms to the Asse II mine in West Germany. It fell under mining
law until 2009, when the Federal Offi ce for Radiation Protection (Bundes-
amt für Strahlenschutz) took charge of Asse II, which meant that disposal
of nuclear waste was no diff erent in legal terms from disposal of house-
hold waste.^51