{news} Fw: USGP-INT Lunch with the FT: Daniel Cohn-Bendit

[Justine McCabe]

Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2007 11:01 AM
Subject: USGP-INT Lunch with the FT: Daniel Cohn-Bendit




Lunch with the FT: Daniel Cohn-Bendit

By George Parker

Published: March 22 2007 19:49 | Last updated: March 22 2007 19:49

You recognise the smile immediately. Daniel Cohn-Bendit¹s face may show the
lines of 61 years, his hair is no longer the burning red of 1968, but the
smile facing me across the table is the same elfin grin which confronted the
city¹s riot police: the iconic picture that defined the Paris student
uprising.

Dany le Rouge has long since transformed himself into Dany le Vert, the
highest-profile Green politician on a continent that has suddenly embraced
the cause he has proclaimed for most of his adult life. He is a rare example
of a truly European politician; he says he is fulfilled. But talk to the
generation for whom Dany¹s authority-defying grin symbolised hope of a new
beginning (not to mention free sex) and you¹ll find a certain melancholy
that he now plies his trade in the European parliament, viewed by some as
one of the most boring institutions on earth.



So how did Cohn-Bendit get from the barricades to the air-conditioned
corridors of the European parliament, and why is he enjoying it so much?
Tony Blair seemed to be asking himself the same question in 2005 when he
faced Cohn-Bendit in Brussels. After listening to a good-natured harangue of
his European policies, the UK prime minister turned to his Franco-German
tormentor and joked: ²I used to read his speeches; now he has to listen to
mine. History will judge whether that is progress.²

Such is Cohn-Bendit¹s love of the European parliament it proves fiendishly
difficult to get him out of the building. After much negotiation, the FT¹s
lunch guest agrees to swap the parliament¹s sedate members¹ restaurant for
the Quartier Leopold, a sleek and suity establishment nearby.

It is a faintly soulless place, as befits its name. The quartier Leopold
used to be one of Brussels¹ most opulent art nouveau neighbourhoods, until
the EU moved in, when its maisons de maitre were demolished and replaced by
faceless office blocks.

Cohn-Bendit admits he prefers the restaurant in the evening, when the Place
du Luxembourg heaves with politicians, journalists, lawyers and interns in a
heady, international mix of politics and sexual frisson. Was it a bit like
that on the streets of Paris in May 1968, I wonder? ²It was absolutely fun,²
says Cohn-Bendit, whose efforts to gain male student access to the girls¹
dormitories was one of the sparks for the revolt. ²You felt for the first
time you were turning the screw, you were not being turned by the
screwdriver. It gave you a feeling of omnipotence.²

How much of it was about sex? Cohn-Bendit says this was a fixation of
²sex-alienated people² at the time. ²The truth was, we were arranging our
lives and bodies, and developing how we wanted to live.² I ask him to
elaborate. ²It was a very emotional situation. A lot of people discovered
themselves and had new relationships. The mythology of the sex was because
it was a completely closed society.²

By now the stylish waitress is hovering. Cohn-Bendit peruses the simple menu
and opts for spring rolls and a scampi brochette. I go for gravadlax of
salmon followed by red tuna. Disappointingly, he wants to drink nothing
stronger than water, but as I discover, Cohn-Bendit does not need alcohol to
hit his stride. Dressed in his trademark ²university lecturer² look of white
T-shirt, open-necked blue shirt, mauve sweater and blue jacket, there is no
holding him back. ²I was a symbol of the beginning,² he says, returning to
the gas-filled streets of Nanterre in 1968. ²I was the sunshine. For a lot
of people I was the perfect projection of the good part of the revolt.² He
pulls his phone from his pocket, and shows me the iconic ²grin² picture. ²My
son found it on the internet and sent it to me,² he says. ²For many people I
was the smile of the time.²

For Cohn-Bendit, it was the liberation of the individual that was the most
important legacy of the ²evenements² that rocked France and captivated the
world. But what did he mean when he said the students had ²won socially and
lost politically²? He explains: ²We thought we could invent a more radical,
better structure than parliamentary democracy. Today I think this is wrong.
But we opened the door. Our modern society recognised that individual
freedom was something which has to be strengthened. It was a great time and
now life goes on.²

His boyish enthusiasm still burns as he recalls how he was expelled from
France to Germany, amid dark mutterings from the authorities about how he, a
German Jew, was trying to destabilise the country. ²When it became clear I
was forbidden to go back, there were 80,000 people on the streets shouting:
¹We are all German Jews.¹²

Back in Frankfurt, he disappeared from the headlines and started hanging out
with Joschka Fischer, who went on to become Green foreign minister of
Germany. Or, as Cohn-Bendit immediately corrects me: ²Joschka Fischer
started hanging out with me.² This was his ²anarcho-leftist² phase, but he
says he had no time for the violent wing of the movement, such as the Red
Army Faction. He mischievously describes his decision to steer clear of the
balaclava brigade as a lifestyle choice. ²The way of life attached to a
guerrilla strategy is not a life,² he sighs. ²I never wanted to be a
terrorist or a minister. Lifestyle is an important issue. If you are a
terrorist you are dealing with the life or death of people, whether you have
the right to kill - that to me is completely mad.

²Being a minister is not the same, but it¹s definitely bad. OK, Joschka
Fischer had a lot of power. But it¹s a terrible life being foreign minister
- you don¹t know who you are or where you are.² Cohn-Bendit says he spoke to
Fischer earlier in the day, and says his old friend is writing a book about
his time in Gerhard Schroder¹s Red-Green coalition. ²It will be really funny
and a bit difficult for Schroder,² he laughs. In retrospect it seems obvious
that Cohn-Bendit should end his spell in Frankfurt (he ran a kindergarten, a
bookshop and ended up as deputy mayor) by re-emerging as a member of the
European parliament. Everything about his past seemed to point in that
direction.

Born in 1945 in Montauban, France, he is the son of German-Jewish parents
who fled to France in 1933. With his German nationality and French identity,
he embodies European reconciliation after the second world war. He was
elected to the European parliament in 1994 in Germany, then in 1999 became
the first MEP to be elected in another country when he fought the campaign
in France. In 2004 he effortlessly returned to stand again in Germany. ²I
wanted to demonstrate my double identity, my whole story,² he says. Fair
enough, but why the European parliament? For all its legislative power, much
of its work is mind-numbingly technical; it is a place of stilted debates in
an often empty chamber, with little in the way of career prospects.

I¹ve hit a nerve. Cohn-Bendit doesn¹t recognise this description at all and
starts twirling his arms with enthusiasm as he describes the experience of
working in the world¹s first truly international parliament. ²It¹s a
European environment that you find nowhere else,² he enthuses. ²You see how
Europeans think, you have to find majorities. I find national parliaments
boring. In the European parliament we are doing history. It¹s a completely
new sort of politics. In 50 or 100 years, historians will analyse all the
moves of the European parliament, looking at how we started the debate on a
European foreign policy, climate change or the social regulation of
globalisation.²

But isn¹t it a shame that so few people in the outside world seem to be
paying attention when he makes his pyrotechnic interventions? (As Tony Blair
discovered, Cohn-Bendit¹s rhetorical style is equivalent to Black Sabbath
turning up at a chamber- music recital.) He shrugs. At least he has five
minutes to make his point to visiting prime ministers like Blair or
Germany¹s Angela Merkel. And his status as an MEP gives him a platform to
speak around Europe, promoting his Green agenda - which has suddenly gone
mainstream. I ask whether this sudden fashionability is a problem for the
Greens. Now that even David Cameron, leader of the British Conservatives, is
going on about climate change and visiting ice floes, doesn¹t that make his
party somewhat redundant?

Cohn-Bendit, officially the co-leader of the parliament¹s Green group,
sighs. ²Five years ago people said to me that the Greens were finished
because nobody cared about ecology. Now they¹re saying everyone¹s interested
in ecology, so the Greens will die.² He believes Europe should take a global
lead in fighting climate change. ²You can see it,² he says. ²You can¹t look
at something like New Orleans and say ¹shit happens.¹ It¹s just a fact.²

As we order coffees, I ask whether he enjoyed the scampi and ponder what
exactly was the green puree on which they were embedded? ²I don¹t know,² he
admits, guessing perhaps peas, or avocado. He tastes the remnants on his
plate, but is still none the wiser. ²Can I look at your menu?² he says to a
neighbouring table.

Not a good sign, and I confess to him that my gravadlax was a little heavy
on the mustard sauce and the tuna - like him - was not quite as rouge as
advertised. No matter. Restaurants like Quartier Leopold are never going to
be short of business so long as the EU is whirring away around the corner.

The coffees arrive and I judge this perhaps the right moment to ask the
difficult question of whether he regrets writing Le Grand Bazar, the book
that gave his critics the chance to portray him as a paedophile. In this
1976 work, exhumed by his political enemies 25 years later, Cohn-Bendit
talks about children in his Frankfurt kindergarten opening his flies and
tickling him. ²I asked them... ¹Why have you chosen me, and not the other
kids?¹² he wrote. ²But if they insisted, I caressed them even so.²

I needn¹t have worried about Cohn-Bendit storming out. The smile is set at
maximum intensity: ²In those times a lot of people, including me, wrote some
foolish things. Provocation was an ideology.² He says nobody batted an
eyelid when the book came out, and it should be seen as ²a crazy sign of the
times². The storm, which might have finished some politicians, blew over.
Parents of the kindergarten mounted a campaign in his defence. He seems
almost to embrace the affair as having added just another stratum to his
multi-layered life.²You have to stand by your history,² he says.

As he prepares to head out into the grey Brussels afternoon, he suddenly
thrusts his phone into my hand. Out of the earpiece Edith Piaf is warbling
Dany le Rouge¹s theme tune: ²Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien².