An alternate view held that the GDR was in a state of civil war with the FRG government, and therefore could not be recognized as a state under international law. A third, the so-called "umbrella state" theory, entails the existence of two fragment states under the umbrella of a single German nation that had been formed in 1871 and which had never actually been annihilated; this theory arose in the late 1960s and was maintained in a ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany of 31 July 1973 upholding the "Basic Treaty" by which relations between East and West Germany were normalised. Crucially, although the Constitutional Court reaffirmed the proposition that the pre-1945 German state had been preserved and organised, albeit partially, in the institutions of the Federal Republic, the Justices explicitly rejected the proposition that this would imply an exclusive mandate; "...identity does not require exclusivity".