The interest in synthetic hydrophilic polymers increases in the industrial enviroment as well as in materials for the daily life. These products are available from functional homopolymers, which are used as emulgators, up to tailor-made copolymers with complex architectures. However there are few techniques that allow a satisfying characterization of those polymers. There are several established chromatographic techniques that have the potential to characterize the molecular as well as the chemical heterogeneity. It is known that the coupling of different techniques increases the available information above the sum of the single techniques. These chromatographic techniques were developed for hydrophobic polymers, but until now there were no coupling methods available for hydrophilic copolymers. This thesis comprises the development of chromatographic and coupled chromatographic techniques for the deformulation of complex hydrophilic copolymer systems. One task was to determine the molar mass distribution for statistical (meth)acrylate copolymers which contain methacrylic acid and dimethyl amino groups respectively. These methods happended to be robust and reproducible, so this is the first time a reliable SEC could be performed for those copolymers which are used as coatings in the pharma industry. The phase system was a SEC-column with medium polarity (GRAM) and an eluent on the basis of N,N-dimethyl acetamide. A second task was the development of chromatographic techniques for hydrophilic segmented copolymers. The model polymers were carboxy group containing copolymers, vinyl alcohol copolymers and modified polyethylene oxides. Those polymers are much more complex than statistical copolymers and heterogeneous in respect to their chemical composition as well as to their molar mass. The charaterization of these copolymers requires multidimensional chromatographic methods which were not available for aqueous systems so far. However a thorough method development of appropriate HPLC- and SEC-methods resulted in the separation of the given copolymers by liquid chromatography at the critical point of adsorption (LC-CC) and aqueous SEC. A correlation of the properties (chemical heterogeneity and molar mass) was achieved by an automated online-coupling of these methods. This coupling as well as the online coupling of the liquid chromatoprahpy with FT-IR spectroscopy was the first known for hydrophilic synthetic copolymers.