Exchange is absolutely necessary for a divided country to achieve peaceful reunification. To examine the exchange of the East-West Germany Trade, which is a successful model for the exchange, is accordingly valuable. Black marketeering between military occupied areas is the starting point of the East-West Germany trade. Understandably, economic exchange is needed since the one nation, one economic unit is suddenly separated by artificial means.
Since the two German governments has become established, they leaded the trade and the amount of trade increased so that by 1989, the last year of the trade, it was 15,309 million VE(DM), which was the 20 times growth of that of the 1950s. This volume could be in Korean currency approximately more than 5 trillion won. East-West Germany Trade was many small businesses from broad range of fields joined, mostly with daily products. Therefore it was politically less affected and was a great help to protect and sustain the national unity.
A consistent and determined stance of the German Federal Republic(West Germany) on the East-West Germany trade is that East Germany and West Germany is in legally still existing the whole country(German Empire), so that they are not in a mutually foreign relationship, rather in a special relationship, and all the state institutions have the legal obligations to protect and sustain the nationality and national unity of this whole country and struggle to integrate the government power that is separately exercised in real. Therefore the German Federal Republic struggled to carry out this regardless of economic interests. According to this position, West Germany strived to extend trade between East and West Germany and did not impose tariffs. Furthermore, they explained their position actively to friendly nations (especially EC and GATT member countries) and achieved their understanding. In consequence of the effort of West Germany's government, 1989/90, when the East-European bloc collapsed, surrounding nations could easily understand the unifications policy of Germany.
By the trade between East and West Germany, the Military Government Law (Militärregierungsgesetz) number 53, proclaimed during the Military Occupations Era, has been applied until the reunification of Germany. Although the Western Allies gave German Republic the right of change, German Federal Parliament kept the name and regulations of the Military Government Law number 53. Even when the Law of Foreign Economic was enacted by the German Federal Parliament, it was not applied to the trade between East and West Germany. It is seen as an action to maintain the uniqueness of the trade between East and West Germany.
In regards to the unconstitutionality controversy of the Military Government Law number 53, the German Federal Constitutional Court judged that it is hard to apply the Fundamental Law principles to the 'general permission and exceptional prohibition' and discretion problem of intendance of permission of rights to freedom. Moreover, Constitutional Court also decided that with the trade between East and West Germany, national agencies should keep the direction of liberalization and an arbitrary regression is not acceptable here. This also has many implications for Korea.
Berlin Convention is the international legal convention that becomes the basis of the trade between East and West Germany. This convention includes a broad range of the annex, memoranda, etc through 130 days of conference. It is not always a good treaty when the period of negotiation is long and contents are lot, however, there is no doubt that this convention is formed extremely carefully. Besides, after the convention became effective, both governments have been strived to perform, complement and develop the convention by crossing east and west Berlin every 2 weeks. It is easy to figure out their efforts on the trade between two states.
One characteristic of Berlin Convention is the way of payment settlement, a system close to the barter through the virtual money, VE. There should be some difficulty to apply the virtual money to the real market because its market price is not built, however, it seems to be inevitable choice at that time. And the adoption of exceeding of limit(Swing) system and special account system was also inevitably adopted for such payment settlement system. Although this settlement system is not a good system with a lot of defects, it can be reviewed considering the North Korea's lack of foreign currency.