GERMAN «ECONOMIC MIRACLE» AND SOCIAL-STATE DEVELOPMENT IN FRG IN 1950-S

The article describes the basic factors for extensive economic growth in FRG in 1950s as well as the concomitant process of implementation of the entire complex of reforms within the large-scale social policy. The concept “social state” is associated with social-political and social-economic systems of the number of highly developed countries, and first of all West-European ones that have provided their citizens with the highest level of social well-being. One of its standards is Federal Republic of Germany, formed in 1949 on the territory of three German western areas, where for the first time in the world constitutional practice a social state was fixed as political and state-legal establishment (art. 20 and 28 of the Basic Law of the FRG). The work analyses in detail economic and social policy of the Federative Republic at that period, as well as attitude of Conrad Adenauer (country chancellor) and the minister of economy Ludwig Erhard (the known father of the German “economic miracle”) towards peculiarities of their implementation. More over, the paper researches correlation between favourable economic conditions called “economic miracle” and the process of the social state establishment within implementation of neo-liberal conception of social market economy, which was accepted by the ruling bourgeois-democratic coalition as a model of the social and economic development of Western Germany.

The author emphasizes the reasons why the conservative-liberal government carried out extensive social reforms in the Federative Republic of Germany as opposed to other western European countries where social-state establishment was run by the initiative of the social parties that came to power after 1945.