At the weekend, we were discussing politics (!) and someone raised the contentious issue of employing a "guest parliament", ie German politicians presiding over UK parliament. This person believed there to be a German loanword which effectively encompassed this concept.

The problem is, nobody could think of the word, so I figured, who better to help than fellow linguaphiles?

Welcome, John - glad you are sharing ideas with us after all that time on the touchline I am no use on this question (sounds like it should be gewilltgewürm to me), but I am sure one of our German speaking friends'll be along in a mo.

Thank you Maverick. I have spent a little while browsing through some recent posts, and am glad I took the plunge.

he-llooooooo!

German speakers - come in now, this query already dates from last month...

Hmm? Is' nich' mein Ding. I'm not really interested in politics, not to mention German politics, but I'll do some guesswork for Mav's benefit.

Suppositions:
- most complex German terms are conglomerates
- most German terms use obvious language

..therefore it could be something like..

Gastpolitik or europäische Austauschpolitik

[/wildlyspeculative]

Einbildpolitik?

> Einbildpolitik?

You mean Einbildungspolitik?

I've never heard of any proposal to use foreign parliaments domestically, largely, I guess because I'm not politically active. It does seem a strange idea though. With the members of the EU all having slightly different forms of government - it would surely be chaos. I know that each country gets to take turns governing in Brussels (which I guess is how the conversation got started), but that has little to do with the internal governments of each member country. This separation seemingly, is one of the major problems that 'Europolitics' faces. Initiatives in Germany to bridge that gap come under the rubrics of Integrationspolitik or Schnittstellenpolitik (lit.: interface politics).


[NickW soll sich zu Wort melden]

You mean Einbildungspolitik?

Perhaps. I coined it after a brief search in my G/E-E/G dictionary and found eingebildet, Einbildung, usw.

For y'all that're interested it was a pun on Realpolitik, Einbildung meaning imaginary.

Some people in UK would say the phrase for Germans playing the role of the UK parliament is just "European Parliament"
Rod

> just "European Parliament"

Sure, why not, but I doubt Europäisches Parlament was what Jonny B. was looking for. More information please :-)

German has several words for Parliament or assembly (Parlament, -rat, -tag, as in Bundesrat and Bundestag) but none of the obvious combinations (Gasttag, etc) ring any bells as a loan word.
Rod