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Subject: [IP] Germany In The Spring By Adam Garfinkle
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GERMANY IN THE SPRING
by Adam Garfinkle
April 7, 2003
Adam Garfinkle is Editor of The National Interest and a
frequent contributor to this space. He wrote this from
Berlin. Among his books is the critically acclaimed
"Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam
Antiwar Movement" (St. Martin's, 1995), written under the
auspices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
GERMANY IN THE SPRING
by Adam Garfinkle
Thanks to an invitation from the American Academy in Berlin,
I'm in Germany -- with the air warming, the flowers
blooming, and the antiwar marches humming right along like
so many hives of busy bees. Yet, despite all the evidence
of palpable nature around, I do feel sometimes as though I
am in a slightly surreal world. Herewith five slices of
recent experience as exemplars.
MARCHING ALONG
This past Sunday's Der Tagesspeigel Morgenpost carried a
photo of yesterday's large antiwar rally in downtown Berlin,
and above it the headline reads "82 percent of Berliners
oppose the war." All the newspapers here focus intently on
antiwar rallies, speeches, supporting op-eds and the like,
not just in Germany, but all over the world. The print and
electronic coverage of the war itself is highly professional
and without any obvious bias, but the war narrative of the
ruling Red-Green coalition government is everywhere to be
seen and heard. That narrative is clearly in consonance with
majority opinion, and helps mightily to shape and reinforce
that opinion. Angela Merkel, the leader of the opposition
CDU who supports the U.S., is more than just busy; she's
downright thoughtful most of the time. She connects the
strategic dots pretty well. The papers here don't ignore her
entirely, but they seem sometimes to be trying.
If you talk to people at the antiwar rallies, it is clear
that most are engaged in a votive rather than a political
act. (Sometimes these acts are not exactly voluntary;
teachers in colleges and high schools bring their classes
with them to rallies, but everyone pretty much seems happy
to be released from studying and teaching.) The sense of a
religious offering is in the air; the mood is intense but
calm and celebratory. Everything is extraordinarily orderly.
It reminded me of a old story by Efraim Kishon, one of
Israel's greatest humorists, about a trip he and his wife
took to Zurich, where everything was so insanely clean that
it seemed a cardinal sin to try to throw away a paper ice
cream wrapper, for even the waste bins were forbiddingly
spotless. I swear that antiwar rallies in Berlin end with
the streets being cleaner than when they began.
Of course, this shouldn't come as such a surprise. This is a
country where no pedestrian dares cross an intersection
against the light, even at 3 o'clock in the morning, and
where dogs are allowed into restaurants and bars with their
owners because they're better behaved than most people in
other countries. (They really are, too.)
So one hears at antiwar rallies, and in op-ed columns, and
in cross-talk in bakeries, busses and bars, that war is bad
because it kills people. Period and full stop most of the
time. In their never-ending search for the appearance, at
least, of holding the moral high ground, most Germans reason
in simple moral categoricals about war. This is very handy,
for it makes the fact that most people know little about the
Middle East, Iraq, or the nature of weapons of mass
destruction fairly irrelevant.
In short, however, average Germans are a lot like average
Americans in this respect, only more so. But while Americans
can look at the uses of American power over the last century
and be more or less comfortable with the outcome, Germans
cannot. They know that war is bad because Germans started
and lost two of them in the 20th century, with no little
amount of breakage in the process. Thanks to two popular
recent books, they also tend equate all bombing with what
the U.S. and British air forces did to Dresden on February
13, 1945. A church down the street from here bears a sign
out front reading, "Kreig ist immer der falsche weg." This
pretty much sums up the majority attitude, as does the large
sign on the local theater in Potsdam, which reads "Kein
Kreig. Nirgends." Anyone who doesn't share it risks being
thought of as atavistic and even vulgar.
This attitude toward the use of force persists despite some
recent and significant changes here. Perhaps surprisingly,
the Green Party has moved a long way from outright pacifism
-- more than the SPD -- some of this movement the result of
the Kosovo War and its aftermath. Some Germans, at least,
now credit the concept of a "just war." Most Germans know
that there are now German military forces in Afghanistan,
that the German navy has patrolled off the coast of Somalia,
and of course that there are German units in the Balkans.
Most are not embarrassed or upset by this, but most Germans
conceive of the use of force as police work, not war-
fighting. For the apparent majority, of all political
persuasions, the "just war" concept remains unacceptable in
polite conversation. This is what has led Peter Schneider,
one of Germany's leading writer/intellectuals, to pronounce
his country "peace-drunk." Those who accept the concept of a
just war are considered, he says, worse than murderers and
rapists in chic circles.
When Peter Schneider and Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- the former
Danny the Red of 1968 Paris, and now a member of the German
Greens -- accept the concept a just war, you know things are
changing. But if you sample street opinion during this war,
you can see how difficult and slow that change is. If you
suggest to the typical demonstrator -- anyone of the 82
percent at random -- that Iraq is a dangerous country, has
been proven so by its track record, and will only get more
dangerous if it isn't stopped, the standard reply is that
Iraq isn't a threat because Hans Blix said so. They don't
believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction more than
has already been identified or destroyed, because Mr. Blix
would have found them. So why, then, are America and Britain
going to war? They answer without a hint of hesitation: Oil;
it's all about oil, greed and imperialism.
What about America's determination to bring democracy to the
Middle East? They laugh. Those who accept its sincerity are
aghast at America's infantile idealism. Most will tell you
that Europeans had grand and beautiful ambitions for the
world, which they saw themselves as being above - and look
what happened. Expressions of American idealism tend to
evoke a "been there, done that" sort of response. Something
to think about, because there may well be something to it.
Most people, however, don't believe that such talk about
democracy is sincere in the slightest, anymore than they
believed a word of what Secretary of State Colin Powell told
the UN Security Council about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction programs. Taking their cue from mass circulation
magazines like Der Speigel, they all know that George W.
Bush is a stupid cowboy who got elected president through
corruption and stealth.
Much of the mass-circulation press in Germany, though not
all, has long been in the hands of the 68er generation, and
it has not been charitable, to put it mildly, to all things
American. The most popular cameo here, on t-shirts, handbags
and heaven knows what else, is Che Guevara. His picture
adorns the cover of the latest issue of the biggest gossip
magazine in the country - the German version of "People."
This helps to explain the size and popularity of current
antiwar sentiment, which is partly anti-Bush but also partly
anti-American in motivation. As is true in the United
States, the antiwar rallies and activities in Germany
resemble a large gaseous planet in structure. Most of the
visible circumference is made up of light, orbiting
elements, but the solid organizing core is much harder. The
role that ANSWER (a.k.a. the Workers World Party) has played
in the United States is played here by the Communist Party,
the residua of former West and East German factions, which
has taken the lead in organizing the demonstrations. With
the Red-Green coalition government against the war, nothing
much here "pushes back," so to speak, against this
organizing. Within both the antiwar core and the government,
there is also a good deal of mostly sub rosa anti-
Americanism that has nothing to do with the Bush
Administration or the post-9/11 world. These elements in
Germany have been anti-American for decades, fearing that
American Cold War policy might have to be validated at
Germany's expense, and they are using the present context
as a vehicle to advance that view in a new forum (that the
American war on terrorism might harm Germany's security) --
with very considerable success, it must be said.
The President's overt, old-timey religiosity makes most
Germans feel particularly creepy, and this also helps to
explain the tone of German feeling. Many Germans identify
standard issue religion as having been an accomplice in the
crimes of European colonialism, militarism, racism, and
disaster--not without at least some justification, it should
be noted. German churches today, Protestant and Catholic
both, are epicenters of pacifism, but polls tell us that
only about 15 percent of Germans attend church services more
than once or twice a year. In smaller towns, that number
seems low - at least according to my own first-hand
experience. Still, George Bush's kind of Christianity
strikes the majority of Germans as something akin to a
freak-show act from a previous century. His acknowledgement
at a news conference that he prays daily, and that he
appreciates deeply the prayers of others offered on behalf
of himself and his family, stuns most viewers here into
baffled silence. They cannot imagine any continental
European head of state saying such things in public because,
in fact, none of them do.
TO THE GENERATION GAP
But these are the attitudes of a mere 82 percent of
Berliners, or maybe only 72 percent, adjusting for
journalistic inflation. Not every German thinks like this,
including, it seems, increasing numbers of younger Germans.
I attended a competition among young journalists -- mostly
in their mid- to late-20s -- vying for working fellowships
in the United States. Most of the several dozen competitors
had been to the United States and wanted very much to go
back. I shared a podium with a distinguished German civil
servant, an elder middle-ranking diplomat, who was most
judicious in his comments. He was skeptical of the then not-
yet-begun war on prudential grounds, but critical of
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's diplomacy, which had isolated
Germany from America and within Europe. I expressed my
support for the war on prudential grounds but criticized the
Bush Administration's new expressions of "liberation
theology" and other signs of hubris and impending overreach.
The young journalists were electrified by these two
presentations. They were not used to hearing analytical as
opposed to moral opposition to war expressed in German by a
German with gray hair. And they were not used to hearing
support for the war expressed in prudential rather than
idealist terms from an American with a beard. Their
reactions were divided, however. One fellow began his
response by saying that, "As a German, I see war as only a
very last resort_.." When he finished I asked him whether he
had really thought through his "last resort" thesis. "Are
you aware," I asked, "of Winston Churchill's efforts before
September 1, 1939 to rally the world to stop Hitler before
it was too late, before a war broke out at a time and place
of Hitler's choosing that would be maximally long and
destructive to all concerned? As a German, you aren't happy
in retrospect that Churchill failed, are you-or happy that
antiwar isolationists in America kept the United States out
of the war against the Nazis effectively for another two and
half years? So why do you argue now that war should only be
a last resort?"
Before he could attempt an answer, one of his female
colleagues spoke up to praise my elder German colleague, and
said: "Why can't our leaders think realistically about
matters of war and peace as you have just done? If our
leaders spoke realistically, it would enable the people
think realistically as well." Later, at the luncheon table,
this young woman answered her own question for me: "The
68ers," she said, "who run this country's politics and
media, collect as much German war guilt as they can, and
they deny arguments saying that British, French, and
American appeasement made the war longer and worse. They
deny that America achieved German reunification against
British, French and Russian opposition, that American power
had anything to do with a positive outcome for Germany. They
do this because their guilt is the seedbed for their
pacifism and escapism, without which they wouldn't know what
to think, without which they would have to engage the real
world with its real dilemmas." I froze in mid-chew. A shock
of insight from an attractive 24-year old woman can do that.
She and those who think like her will have to swim upstream
here - that's for sure. In the Berlin Wall Museum, right
next to Checkpoint Charlie, for example, success in the Cold
War is directly equated to personal bravery, people power,
and non-violent resistance. Positively depicted, in
addition to all of the brave and indigenous Germans who
escaped from East Berlin, are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the anti-nuclear demonstrations in Germany in
the 1980s. So are the uprisings in East Germany in 1953,
Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, Romania in 1989, and Russia
in 1991. NATO is never mentioned.
ON THE 18TH FLOOR
Die Welt's executive offices are at the top of the Axel-
Springer Verlag building in Berlin, built just adjacent to
where the Berlin Wall once stood. Some of these men may be,
technically speaking, members of the 68er generation, but
they do not act or think like that generation.
The editorial leadership of the paper hosted me at a private
lunch, and the conversation was most edifying. There clearly
are people in Germany who can get to the second paragraph,
and well beyond, of an analytical treatment of the war and
related security issues. They may have prudential misgivings
about American policy, but they know that the collapse of
the U.S. position in Southwest Asia before Saddam's petty
imperialism would harm Europe far more than the United
States. They know that Chancellor Schroeder's "unilateral
and pre-emptive" electoral diplomacy last August -- their
words, not mine -- opened the way for Jacques Chirac to
hijack German interests and prerogatives. They know that it
is American strength in the world that allows Europe's
experiment in peaceful, federal unification to go on without
risk, and that it is American economic strength -- the
engine of global economic expansion -- that allows the EU's
protectionism and stultifying managerial conservatism at
home to persist.
They are concerned about Atlantic relations, and about
recent polls showing that only 11 percent of Germans
consider the United States to be Germany's closest friend
(down from 50 percent in 1995), while France ranks at 30
percent.
So why don't you say all this in your editorials, I asked? I
learned that sometimes they do, and so does Die Zeit and
some other papers. These positions are supported by many
German diplomatic and military professionals, and by many
businessmen with international experience. But the majority
of Germans, I was led to understand, don't read such things.
They are not interested in politics -- except sometimes the
insular politics of EU federalism. International politics
are about power, armies, nationalism, corporate interests
and war, and these are all things Germans have been
anathematized to in school and later in life.
Germany was also enfolded in both an inner and an outer
multilateralism -- the EU and NATO -- and its sense of
independent policy formulation was minimized by more than 50
years of being thus enfolded. Those relatively few Germans
who can think strategically, and are not embarrassed to do
so, do it well; the majority, however, don't wish to think
this way and are disinclined to listen to those who do. The
political environment today, during the war, reflects both
currents. Serious people do air their views, but with the
ambient level of political attention raised and colored by
the war, and with the sitting government catering to the
populist know-nothingism of the day, they are, by and large,
failing. I have heard, too, from some elder Greens that the
political-psychological dynamic set in motion by this war
has set back the maturation of German views that had begun
with the Kosovo crisis.
Isn't it odd, I said, that at just the moment when Germany
is of necessity emerging from the outer enfolding of the
Cold War era, it has a government least capable of engaging
in independent strategic thought. "Odd, perhaps," they
replied, but better "sad." A senior editor of Die Welt
took me over to the great plate glass windows facing east
and west and said to me that, a dozen years ago, one could
look out of these windows and see two different worlds. To
the east was in a kind of shabby black-and-white, to the
west a scene in technicolor. Little by the little, the
differences disappeared, and now the view to the east from
the 18th floor doesn't look much different from the view to
the west. Inside people's heads, however, things have been
slower to change. Here is a case, he explained, where what
you see is not necessarily what you get -- at least not yet.
I thanked him for lunch, and for more than that.
WITH THE MINISTER
A minister of the current government, a member of the Green
Party, came to Wannsee, to the American Academy, for a
private session with an American "group of seven." To make a
long and somewhat strange episode a bit shorter, this
minister made Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean seem like
Machiavellian realists by comparison. The minister insisted
that Iraq was no threat to its neighbors or to the United
States -- because Hans Blix said so. He insisted further
that Iraq was not special among its neighbors, that there
were lot of undemocratic states in the area, so why pick on
Iraq, and why pick on it now?
This was much too much for the Americans assembled. Iraq not
special? Did the minister not remember the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, and its attack on Iran before that? Could the
minister think of any other local state with such a record?
Did the minister not recall the 16, now 17, unrequited UN
Security Council resolutions, chapter 7 resolutions at that,
that Iraq was in violation of, and could the minister name
any other country in a similar circumstance? Did the
minister forget somehow that, according to Ambassadors Rolf
Ekeus and Richard Butler -- not just according to the U.S.
government -- Iraq had manufactured enough nerve agent,
anthrax and other toxins to kill literally every man, woman
and child on the planet? That it had actually used WMD to
murder thousands of its own citizens? Could the minister
name any other country in such a category? Had the minister
forgotten that when inspectors last worked in Iraq, in 1998,
missing growth media and chemical weapons precursors were
listed, literally by the ton, that have never been accounted
for? Did the minister think that in the four years since
1998 Iraq has come to have less such prohibited materials,
and, if so, what would be the logic for such a conclusion?
These questions made nary a dent. The minister simply said
that war should always be a last resort and that the
inspections were working. Did the minister think that
"progress" in the inspection process, asked another
participant, was owed to anything other than the threat of
force -- but then again, how could there be "progress" if,
as he claimed, if there was probably no WMD there to be
found in the first place?
Whereupon another American, who happens to be against the
war on prudential grounds, argued that had the U.S. Navy
sunk one Serbian ship off the coast of Dubrovnik in 1992, a
quarter of a million civilians would probably still be
alive. Is surgery the "last resort" in the face of cancer
known to be growing? How could Germans, who know that Hitler
could have been stopped earlier, who saw with their own eyes
the way the Euromissile debate played out in the 1980s, who
watched the way the Cold War was won and Germany reunified,
conclude that strength, including the threat and "other-
than-last-resort" use of force, was not an asset in a
serious diplomacy?
But it was Mikhail Gorbachev, as all the Greens and SPD
supporters know, who ended the Cold War. That's why Germany
has since made him an honorary citizen.
This remark, even more than several others, temporarily
removed most of the oxygen from the room. It had by then
become clear that the minister was living in a world other
than one we recognized. It may be true, as some critics say,
that the Bush Administration inner circle lives in its own
closed world of logic in which Al-Qaeda and the Ba`ath Party
are imagined somehow virtual subsidiaries of one another.
But such a circle has nothing on the world of SPD-Green
coalition, where senior members of government cannot seem to
reason their way out of a mini-mart.
AHMED AND ME
This past Friday morning, I agreed to do a "conversation
interview" for Die Welt. I was to talk with Ahmed Berwari,
the German representative of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan. Journalists from Die Welt were to ask questions,
guide the conversation, and take down the results. We met at
a chic restaurant just a few yards from Checkpoint Charlie
and the Wall Museum, an Italian spot called Sale y Tabacci.
The journalists knew that Mr. Berwari was an Iraqi national,
and that in previous weeks he had been quoted widely as
having opposed a war. The journalists invited along a
photographer, who had with him little flags, one American
and one Iraqi. It was fairly clear that they expected some
sort of debate, with me as an American supporting a war and
Ahmed as an Iraqi opposing it.
What a surprise they were in for.
Mr. Berwari was frank about the recent evolution of his
views about war. Both major Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq
had opposed a war because it threatened what was, for the
Kurds, about the best situation they had ever known.
Saddam's forces, or the Turks, would be in a position to
smash Kurdish autonomy in a war. But since the Americans had
made it clear that they intended to destroy the Iraqi
regime, restrain the Turks, and protect the Kurds with a
northern front, the Kurds were now in nervous but still
enthusiastic support of the effort.
"Why?" asked the journalists, seemingly genuinely
disappointed and puzzled. Ahmed did not know what to say. So
I asked them: "Have you ever heard of what happened at
Halabja?" Vaguely, they had; somehow, however, they could
not put the pieces together to explain why the Kurds would
be happy to see Saddam dispatched to the other world.
One journalist asked me if the war was legal. I said it was
as far I understood the doctrine of self-help in
international relations. The preamble to the UN Charter
contains the relevant language; I suggested they review it.
Then there are, I reminded them, the 17 Security Council
resolutions holding Iraq in contempt of world opinion, most
of which, being chapter 7 resolutions, justified the use of
force. But German experts, I was told, hold that without
Security Council authorization for the use of force, all
such uses are not legal. I was also told that never before,
since 1945, had force been used to depose a government
without UN Security Council authorization. Recalling what
happened in Panama, Grenada, Kosovo--and not to speak of how
many African governments have been made and broken by France
and French troops -- I found this a pretty astonishing
claim. Pretty soon, too, I was told that Iraq was not a
threat to anyone, since Hans Blix said so -- and isn't this
really all about oil?
Ahmed then suddenly got quite animated about the matter of
what is and is not lawful in the eyes of the United Nations.
Tens of thousands of Kurds were murdered by Saddam and his
henchmen, and no one brought the matter before the UN
Security Council. Does that, he asked them, with some heat
in his otherwise calm voice, make it alright? Hundreds of
resolutions brought against Israel in the General Assembly
for its supposedly terrible treatment of Arabs, but not one
resolution brought calling attention to far worse Arab
treatment of non-Arab minorities in Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and
elsewhere.
Ahmed then pointed out in some detail how about half of the
efforts of the Iraqi regime in the war were directed against
its own people. Hospitals had been used in Nasiriya and
Najaf to hide tanks, ammunition, chemical weapons suits and,
more ominously, nerve-gas atrophine antidote injectors. One
journalist asked me how I knew that Iraq possessed any
chemical and biological weapons when Hans Blix said he could
not find any. I asked in return: Why do you think the Iraqi
regime would send chemical weapons suits and antidote
injectors to the south of the country if they didn't have
such weapons, and maybe even intend to use them again? I got
no answer.
As if oblivious to most of what went on, the tag-along
photographer at session's end suggested that I hold the U.S.
flag and Ahmed the Iraqi flag in a joint photo. Ahmed took
one look at the Iraqi flag and make it crystal clear that he
had no intention of identifying with it. At that point, if
the Mad Hatter himself had emerged to pour tea, neither
Ahmed nor I would have been terribly surprised. When the
interview was published on Sunday, March 30, it nevertheless
had large letters reading "Irak" under Ahmed's photo and
"USA" under mine. Go figure.
If Germans feel any sense of Schadenfreude over America's
early difficulties in the war, they aren't saying so in
public. The popular magazine Focus calls the war a "debacle"
on the cover of its current issue, but doesn't gloat about
it. It is galling, however, to know that many do express
such sentiments in private--galling because someone's being
superficially right for unserious or plain wrong reasons is
far harder to take than their being right or wrong for any
set of sensible reasons. Chancellor Schroeder's use of last
summer's floods and the threat of war in his re-election
campaign amounted to help from two of the four horsemen of
the apocalypse, and it turned out that two of four was
enough for the purpose at hand. But for Schroeder to make
still more political capital out of Anglo-American
difficulties is just plain unfair, especially in light of
his otherwise plunging popularity since his re-election. The
Chancellor is therefore in some ways the guy who got it all
wrong, and prospered anyway.
Will he continue to prosper? It's hard to say. Opposition
contenders seems to be taking turns trying to undermine
Angela Merkel. On the other hand, the SPD party in Hamburg,
where it is very strong, and has been for decades, is making
trouble for Schroeder. The key, perhaps, is the declining
economy - but the opposition CDU/CSU doesn't yet seem to
have found any better solutions to the problem. The
coalition is very unlikely to fall and the next election is
years away. Chancellor Schroeder will be around for a
while, it seems.
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