Germany Archives - Page 28 of 108

The precautionary principle

The precautionary principle is a German export. It arose as the Vorsorgeprinzip in German environmental law in the early 1970s and was written into the Federal Emission Protection Act of 15 March 1974.

It reached international law in 1987 at the North Sea conference, and was entrenched in 1992 as Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, from where it passed into most international environmental conventions.

The principle holds that where serious or irreversible harm is possible, the absence of full scientific certainty is not a reason to wait.

Germany did not adopt an international norm about prevention. It wrote one and the world took it.

The service path

The service path. The German term for the prescribed sequence through which a matter travels upward. Going around it — am Dienstweg vorbei — is itself a breach, separate from whatever the underlying complaint was.

The household stockpile

Vorratshaltung. The German Federal Office of Civil Protection publishes a recommendation that households keep supplies of food and water for a period of days, with a checklist of what and how much. The state issues a stockpiling guide to ordinary citizens as standing advice, not in response to any particular threat.

Belonging to the company

Belonging-to-the-company. A single German noun for length of service, and it carries legal weight in notice periods, redundancy selection, severance calculations and pension entitlements. The word is not about time elapsed. It is about belonging, and the law treats the belonging as something that accrues.

The collective agreement

A German Tarifvertrag sets pay grades, hours, holiday and conditions for an entire industry, and firms apply it rather than negotiate individually. The framework is written above the firm and the firm works within it.

Contracts must be kept

Pacta sunt servanda is quoted in German legal education as the foundation of contract law, and German civil law treats the binding force of agreement as a starting premise rather than as one consideration among several. An agreement is not a statement of current intention that both sides revisit. It is the thing that was settled.

Emotional blackmail

Emotionale Erpressung. Emotional blackmail. A German term applied to a negotiator who invokes the relationship, the history, or personal difficulty in order to move a position. The word names it as coercion rather than as persuasion.

The expert works alone

Dafür haben wir Sie ja geholt — that is what we brought you in for. Said in German when a supplier asks the client how to proceed on a matter within the supplier’s own expertise. It is not impatience. It is a statement about where the responsibility went when the contract was signed.

Insulation standards

Wärmedämmung. German building regulation prescribes insulation standards for new construction and for major renovation, with required values for walls, roofs, windows and doors. The efficiency of the building is regulated at the point of construction, when it is cheapest to achieve.

Of the subject

To be vom Fach. Of the subject.

Said of someone who genuinely knows the field, as distinct from someone who has an opinion about it. Er ist vom Fach ends an argument.

There is no comfortable English equivalent. “He knows his stuff” is about the person. Vom Fach is about belonging to a body of knowledge.