The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (109 page)

 
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The German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic achieved full political unification in October 1990, thus ending a division between the two separate German states which had been a central problem of the
Cold War
. Constitutionally unification was achieved by the territories of the former communist GDR becoming part of the Federal Republic, whose legal jurisdiction was now extended to encompass the six new eastern
Länder
, including Berlin.
The process of unification was precipitated by the collapse of the GDR's communist regime in 1989, which occurred against a background of intense struggle for social and political change throughout Eastern Europe. Widespread popular protest in the GDR, as well as a massive exodus of citizens to the West, made it clear that there was an irreversible demand for democratization and liberalization. Chancellor Kohl's Christian Democrat/Free Democrat Government in the Federal Republic was able to move ahead quickly with a policy of unification, and this was subsequently endorsed through legislative elections in the GDR in March 1990, when a Christian Democrat-led ‘Alliance for Germany’ gained a decisive victory over their political rivals. Critics of the way in which unification was achieved have argued that it amounted to a ‘take-over’ of the former GDR by the Federal Republic and its government, and that the immediate result was economic crisis and political instability. The real, effective integration of two formerly separate societies is an extremely complex task that will undoubtedly take a long time to resolve.
KT 

 
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Drawing of district boundaries so as to favour one's own chances in future elections. In 1812 Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts drew boundaries for electoral districts in the state so as to maximize the chance of his party's winning seats. The cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale superimposed the head and tail of a salamander on a map showing some of Gerry's long, thin, and tortuous districts, and coined the word. Sometimes misspelt as ‘jerrymandering’.

 
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See
Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft
.

 
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Title of study (1970) by R. M. Titmuss of blood supply in Britain and the United States. Titmuss took his title from anthropological studies of reciprocal gift-giving, especially Marcel Mauss's
The Gift
(English translation 1954), and his data from a survey of UK donors. The study shows that more and purer blood was available in Britain than in the United States, although nobody was paid, nor received any other favour, for donating. Titmuss used his results to claim that humans are more altruistic than he believed economic man to be, and that the success of altruistic systems of blood donation may be related to the highly developed networks of gift and counter-gift studied by anthropologists in Africa and Polynesia.

 
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A group of deputies in the Assembly and Legislative Convention, many of them from the Gironde area around Bordeaux, established during the French Revolution. Centred around the figure of J. -P. Brissot , the ‘faction of the Gironde’ represented the resistance of the provinces to Parisian dominance, and opposition to the emerging dictatorship and terror under Robespierre. In June 1793 the Girondins were themselves expelled from the Convention and later killed.
SW 

 
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