This work provides a chronological and thematic account of empirical studies and position papers on second language (L2) writing scholarship from a complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) perspective. As a theoretical framework, CDST was formally introduced into applied linguistics research by Diane Larsen-Freeman in 1994 (Larsen-Freeman, 1994). However, more than a decade passed before CDST-L2 writing studies emerged in the literature, with Larsen-Freeman (2006) frequently cited as the first related publication. Initially, scholarship focused primarily on the quality of linguistic output (e.g., measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency, or CAF) in North American and European contexts. Since these early foci, studies have expanded to cover a range of constructs and contexts that employ increasingly sophisticated and diverse research methods (for a recent collection of studies, see Fogal & Verspoor, 2020). In this time, a CDST approach to L2 writing research has matured alongside a general CDST view of language change that has contributed, through empirical studies, to understanding the nonlinear, adaptive, context dependent, and complex and dynamic nature of L2 development (see Hiver et al., 2021, for an overview).

Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik is widely regarded as a precursor to World War I, as a reckless break from the Bismarckian past, and as a counterproductive form of German deviation from European norms. Yet, when one reexamines certain German overseas expansion schemes between 1897 and the early 1900s, a strong intellectual continuity emerges between the methods of Weltpolitik and wider views about colonial sovereignty. Like Bismarck and other European imperial powers in the late nineteenth century, the actors producing Weltpolitik sought to enlist private businessmen in colonial governance, as well as to parcel and transfer sovereignty as a commodity in places like the Caribbean island of St. John. Counterintuitively, this way of treating sovereignty was highly imitative and compliant with norms, both at home and abroad. It also represented an alternative, at least at times, to a more aggressive course in foreign policy.

The postwar deconcentration of IG Farben AG shows that the Allied military governments and their German counterparts were anything but united on the extent and form of sovereignty the Federal Republic of Germany should receive. The American plan to divide the corporate enterprise into a large number of individual companies aimed to establish a democratic state independent from the influence of domestic business. By contrast, West German government officials and the business community were convinced that the future sovereignty of the Federal Republic depended on the global competitiveness of large industrial conglomerates. To thwart the American deconcentration plans, they traded off one dimension of sovereignty against the other. Leading members of the West German government accepted delegating the negotiations over the future of IG Farben to business representatives, thereby sharing domestic sovereignty because the delegation promised to maintain a powerful German chemical industry that could support the trade balance of the future West German state. This development contributed to the emergence of a Federal Republic characterized by the close involvement of economic actors in political decision-making. It contained important elements of a post-democratic sovereignty, which is commonly used to describe the development of the late twentieth century.

This article introduces a special issue on the politics of sovereignty in German history. Historical work provides an important corrective to understand the current discursive resurgence of sovereignty. Historians (and other scholars) should treat sovereignty not as a factual description of the world, but rather analyze it as a rhetorical claim to assert power in territorial, political, economic, legal, and cultural disputes. Much of the power of sovereignty lies in the power to define its boundaries, whether geographical or conceptual. German history offers a particularly fruitful route to historicize the concept, as Germany is arguably both a paradigmatic and a special case in the history of sovereignty. From late-nineteenth-century colonialism to contemporary disputes around gambling restrictions, German discourse on sovereignty has intertwined with and challenged international understandings of sovereignty together with neighboring concepts, such as independence, autonomy, supreme authority, and control. In the twentieth century, perhaps no country experienced stronger affirmations of both sovereignty and the necessity to integrate into inter- and supranational structures than the country at the center of the two world wars and subsequently divided during the Cold War.

In this paper, I demonstrate that a well-known left-right asymmetry, Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts’s (2014) Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC), which these authors claim follows from Kayne’s Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), is actually better explained under a symmetric approach to syntactic structure building in tandem with the mechanism that underlies the constraints on rightward movement. Apart from circumventing the theoretical and empirical problems that this LCA-based analysis faces, the fact that particles form a natural class of counterexamples to FOFC naturally follows under such a symmetric approach. The final part of this paper shows that this explanation to FOFC also straightforwardly applies to the semi-universal leftwardness of (subject) specifiers in both head-final and head-initial languages.