{news} Fw: USGP-INT So, Farewell Then, Joschka Fischer - The German America needs most leaves politics

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Feinstein" <mfeinstein at feinstein.org>
To: <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 4:21 PM
Subject: USGP-INT So, Farewell Then, Joschka Fischer - The German America 
needs most leaves politics


> http://slate.msn.com/id/2128286/
>
>
> So, Farewell Then, Joschka Fischer
> The German America needs most leaves politics.
> By Michael Scott Moore, Slate
> Posted Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 9:44 AM PT
>
>
> "Until the Iraq War, we were always like the children of America," a giddy 
> young German woman said to me at a demonstration last May, where thousands 
> of Berliners turned out to block a group of neo-Nazis from parading 
> through town. The afternoon was over, and the Nazis wouldn't march, but a 
> sense of elation still brimmed in the streets. "We didn't have our own 
> identity," she said. "We always had to go along with what America did. But 
> when Joschka Fischer refused to go along with Donald Rumsfeld and send our 
> soldiers to Iraq, for the first time in my life I felt proud to be German. 
> It was wonderful."
>
> Anyone who wants to understand what Germany lost in its recent snap 
> election needs to consider this sentiment. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder 
> called the election one year early to win support for his controversial 
> welfare-reform program. The support wasn't there, and now he's lost his 
> job. But the election results were so confusing that Angela Merkel also 
> lost a good deal of power in her bargain to become Germany's first female 
> chancellor. Her conservative Christian Democrats will now rule in an 
> uncomfortable "grand coalition" with Schröder's Social Democrats. No one 
> seems to have won a thing, and everyone's claiming victory; but the single 
> clear casualty in this autobahn pileup is Joschka Fischer and his Green 
> Party.
>
> Fischer was Schröder's foreign minister and his sharp-tongued conscience 
> during the seven-year coalition between the SPD and the Greens. He entered 
> politics irreverently—he and other German Greens were famous in the 1980s 
> for wearing jeans and tennis shoes to parliament—and began his exit 
> gracefully, even before the recent coalition talks had ended, by bowing 
> out of the Green Party leadership. He was a former anti-Vietnam War street 
> fighter who grew up to become one of Europe's most honest and keen-minded 
> politicians—but unlike Schröder, he didn't live for politics. "I want back 
> the freedom I traded for power 20 years ago," he was recently quoted as 
> saying.
>
> Fischer and Schröder took Cabinet seats in 1998, and for the first time 
> there were people in charge of the Federal Republic of Germany with no 
> connection to World War II. Helmut Kohl, chancellor from 1982 to 1998, was 
> the last, leftover symbol of the Cold War, a pear-shaped conservative 
> leader Fischer once derided—to his face—as "150 kilograms of the past made 
> flesh." It's hard to believe he's been gone only seven years.
>
> Now Kohl's protégée, Angela Merkel, is chancellor, and some American 
> pundits see her bringing Germany back to the American fold after 
> Schröder's season of anti-war grandstanding. Schröder did grandstand—he 
> was always hard to distinguish from his own outsized persona—but Fischer 
> never seemed to lose his head. His defining moment, the scene everyone in 
> Germany remembers, and possibly the media highlight of his political 
> career, came in early 2003 at a defense conference in Munich held by 
> European leaders to discuss Iraq. He looked at Donald Rumsfeld and said 
> simply, in front of the cameras and the gathered politicians, "Excuse me, 
> I am not convinced."
>
> To some Americans, that had a treasonous sound, but now we know what 
> Fischer meant: "Excuse me, your intel sucks." And for anyone still wishing 
> to misconstrue the German position as knee-jerk adolescent 
> anti-authoritarianism, Fischer made things nice and clear: "The power of 
> the United States is a totally decisive factor for peace and stability in 
> the world," he said. "I don't believe Europe will ever be militarily 
> strong enough to look after its security alone. But a world order in which 
> the national interests of the strongest power is the criterion for 
> military action simply cannot work."
>
> Fischer was, in other words, the kind of intelligent and principled 
> European politician America needs—not a lap dog, but a loyal critic. He 
> lost a lot of support within his own party when he pushed to send German 
> troops to Kosovo in 1998. Like the United States, but unlike many Germans, 
> he favors Turkish membership in the European Union. He looks insufferably 
> liberal to the right and like a right-wing sellout within his own party; 
> but he expresses a clear and thoughtful German position that's no longer 
> in lock step with the United States.
>
> Merkel's chancellorship may represent a thaw in German-American relations, 
> but anyone who thinks her rise to power implies that the German public is 
> warming up to Washington is dead wrong. She didn't win, first of all: The 
> CDU and the SPD fell so far short of their own expectations that they had 
> to huddle in a room for three weeks to work out who was in charge. The 
> German people voted against Merkel and Schröder, by and large, by throwing 
> historic levels of support behind smaller parties from the West and the 
> East—the business-friendly FDP and the ex-Communist Left Party.
>
> The CDU's relative friendliness to Washington became a key point for 
> Schröder late in the campaign; if anything, it hurt Merkel. The major 
> shift in the election this year was a groundswell of protest against the 
> stagnated economy, which is not, by the way, Gerhard Schröder's fault: If 
> anything, it's Helmut Kohl's. The old pear reunified Germany without 
> bothering to explain how the generous retirement schemes in the West were 
> suddenly going to support millions of new citizens from the East, who in 
> any case were used to even more generous retirement schemes. Kohl did 
> exactly nothing about this problem after 1990 and still managed to hang 
> onto his job for eight more years. Schröder tackled it—late—and finds 
> himself sacked after seven.
>
> Merkel's new grand-coalition government will make history if it somehow 
> manages to fix the economy. Officially, it will be closer to President 
> Bush and the United States, but it won't be all that representative of the 
> popular will. The cliché about grand coalitions between Germany's two 
> major parties is that they get nothing done, but the last time German 
> politics ground to a halt under a grand coalition was in 1966-69, when the 
> nation's rowdy New Left youth was at war in the streets with its Nazi 
> past. Fischer was a rioting hippie. Those three years changed German 
> society changed for good, by ushering in a generation that could 
> articulate rage and shame over World War II.
>
> German society will no doubt change again in the next few years, but not 
> necessarily in Washington's favor. Discontent with Fischer and Schröder, 
> unemployment, and even the European Union does not equal a sudden German 
> love for President Bush or the war in Iraq. The Left Party, which sprang 
> into existence this year, is one example of how things can go quite wrong. 
> Some of its new parliamentary members used to inform for East Germany's 
> Stasi, and none of them have any lingering love for Washington.
>
> The Greens did no better and no worse this year than in 2002; their 
> support held steady at about 8 percent. Fischer is leaving because 
> Schröder's snap election essentially dissolved their ruling coalition. In 
> the process, Germany loses a smart and eloquent politician who managed to 
> speak his mind and speak for thousands of Germans; who could criticize the 
> United States without hating it; and who gave an international face to 
> what we might call the "good Germans"—the ones who can grapple 
> intelligently with both World War II and the Cold War and declare that 
> both have ended.
>
> This face may not be recognizable to everyone. When President Bush came to 
> Mainz last February to shake hands with Schröder for the cameras and 
> pronounce a new day in German-American relations, he was introduced to a 
> tart-looking but not-quite-familiar man.
>
> "Hello, what's your name?" Bush said to Joschka Fischer.
>
> "My name is Mr. Fischer," deadpanned Germany's then-foreign minister. 
> "What's your name?"
>
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