{news} Fw: USGP-INT Speaking of center-right, or just right-wing

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: a.gronowicz at att.net 
To: usgp-int at gp-us.org 
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 10:53 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Speaking of center-right, or just right-wing


 THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Joschka Fischer's Strange Trip
>From street radical to the German foreign ministry--and now to Princeton.
by MATTHEW KAMINSKI 
Saturday, March 31, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT 

PRINCETON, N.J.--"You have to try this," says the Frederick H. Schultz Class of 1951 Professor of International Economic Policy at Princeton, pushing his cup my way with an impish grin. Mexican hot chocolate with anchovy peppers, cinnamon, cayenne and whipped cream; it's not bad. You don't find such curiosities in Europe, admits the charming and relaxed German seated before me. Wearing brown boots, a black turtleneck and black North Face coat, he looks like a faculty regular--gray-haired, 1968 vintage--at Small World Coffee, a hip spot right near campus.

But little more than a year ago, Joschka the professor was Joschka the powerful, abrasive two-term foreign minister of Germany, in three-piece suits. Before that came Joschka the Green Party leader, in casual dress. And before that was Joschka the neo-Marxist headbanger, active in 1970s radical circles. (In a famous series of photographs that surfaced a few years ago, a young Fischer, in a black motorcycle helmet, beats up a German police officer.) It all began with Joschka the demonstrator from that epic year of '68 in jeans and a T-shirt.

In between, Mr. Fischer lost a few front teeth, drove a taxi at night, and led Germany into its first war since the Nazi days. Five marriages later, this high-school dropout who spent the bulk of his adult life fighting American foreign policy, sometimes with brute force, is a retired politician ("done," yes, "out of politics") in a cozy Ivy League post. Ever imagine that? "No," he responds in a not unpleasant German accent, "but here you can see how funny life is."

His life is both unusual and yet representative of his generation's journey, or more precisely that of the European left born right after World War II. Raised amid peace and rapid economic recovery west of the Iron Curtain, Mr. Fischer rebelled before becoming the establishment. Of the '68 leaders, none won higher government office. His most dramatic conversion came with his endorsement of military force--led by once-abhorred America no less--to stop genocide in the Balkans. The intellectual left discovered "good wars" in the 1990s, only to bicker and split in the post-9/11 world. In Iraq in 2003, the New Left historian and fellow '68er Paul Berman wrote in "Power and the Idealists," "the airy concept known as 'our generation' finally ceased to exist."

Without sounding defensive, Mr. Fischer tries to make sense of his own contradictions. As for many Europeans over 50, World War II is the defining event. "I grew up with the two lessons which had to be learned based on German history, 20th century history, especially the Nazi period," he says. "No more war--because war means in modern German history that we were attacking our neighbors, committing terrible crimes. And no more holocaust, no more genocide."

For some in the '68-era left, the Soviet Gulags, Pol Pot, the boat people from Vietnam all brought home that military means are sometimes needed to stop human suffering. For Mr. Fischer, the turn came two decades later when the nationalist fires spread in the Balkans. "Suddenly these two principles"--an end to war and genocide--"were in confrontation in Sarajevo, in Bosnia . . . this was very painful and started within myself, it was something very serious, and after Srebrenica the decision for me was quite clear."

Mr. Fischer's first big decision at the foreign ministry was to sign off on NATO's 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo. He was in a small minority inside his pacifist Green movement but prevailed, showing "great courage and lucidity," in the words of a fellow traveler and founder of Doctors Without Borders, the Frenchman Bernard Kouchner. Tony Blair may have been the most eloquent champion of Kosovo-style interventionism, but Joschka Fischer took the Continental left to places it never dreamed of going. He plays it down with a (sort of) joke. "You saw the pictures of my past," he says, "I was never a pacifist."

After advocating action in Bosnia and leading it in Kosovo, the popular foreign minister helped bring Slavs and Albanians back from the brink of war in Macedonia. The last time I saw him in person, he was barking orders to a half dozen aides over breakfast in Skopje, the Macedonian capital. A small NATO force and international diplomacy secured the peace deal.

"We avoided another tragedy," he says. "When that took place, I thought, 'So Joschka, that's it, now relax. All the pain is behind you. You can now prepare for elections.' " He was at his political peak. A few days later, when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, his first thought was: "This will change the world."





It did not change his world, certainly, for the better. Though he and his government supported the U.S.-led war against the Taliban--strengthening his newly minted credentials as a pro-American--he says Paul Wolfowitz and other so-called neoconservatives in the administration reminded him of his friends from the '68 barricades, which made him uneasy before Iraq really came up. "They are strongly ideological," he says. "I had my ideological decade." Around the same time, his coalition partner, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, used a last-minute appeal to anti-Americanism to swing the close 2002 election to their red-green coalition.
Iraq brought more trouble for Mr. Fischer and within his intellectual camp. Saddam Hussein was far more brutal than Slobodan Milosevic and led a totalitarian regime inspired by none other than Nazi Germany. For the idealists, a small but hugely influential minority on the left in Europe (and, though that's now an inconvenient truth, a far bigger one in the U.S.), Iraq was at least as compelling a case for intervention as Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Macedonia. Only the man doing the intervening was the distrusted George W. Bush.

Whether hemmed in by Chancellor Schröder's early, preemptive opposition to the Iraq war or personal conviction, Mr. Fischer turned out to be one of the most prominent European opposition voices. One scene, from February 2003, stands out. "Excuse me, I'm not convinced," a visibly irritated Mr. Fischer told Donald Rumsfeld, who'd presented the U.S. case for war, at the annual Munich security conference. His loss of diplomatic cool was noted by allies as well as enemies--and his break with political and ideological soul mates like Messrs. Blair or Kouchner caused a lot of reflection. "I thought a lot about that," he says. "It seemed to be that they believe in principles."

Then he changes topics, before offering a self-justification, one informed by hindsight of the difficulties in Iraq since the invasion. "[Saddam's] was really a terrible regime. But there are some other terrible regimes around. I was never convinced [the U.S.] will control the effects of such intervention."

With Iran's nuclear rattling against Israel, where Mr. Fischer has many friends, would military means be justified to stop "another holocaust" now? "The use of force will lead us into hell," he says, before softening his tone. "It makes no sense to have illusions about the Iranians; I've negotiated with them. But on the other hand the final decisions about the nuclear program have not been made." After a pause: "But of course the option of a second holocaust is unacceptable, and this won't take place ever--ever."

Some thinkers on the left soured on "humanitarian interventionism" before Iraq, and the notion now seems fully discredited on his side of the political aisle, Bosnia a distant memory. (On the other side, interventionism never caught on as a thing in itself.) "It's not a dogma and it's not dead," responds Mr. Fischer. "If there is a need, if there is a pressure, if there is no other way out, it will come back. But unfortunately people will be much more hesitant, at least in the United States."

Mr. Fischer is self-avowedly no longer an idealist like Mr. Kouchner. "I will tell you what changed me into a realist," Mr. Fischer says. "First of all my experience with ideologies and the way it can end." He means, I presume, the fringe left's embrace of terrorism in the 1970s; he was acquainted with members of the Revolutionary Cells and the Red Army Faction (a k a the Baader-Meinhof Gang) that killed dozens, although he denies ever taking part himself. (The Revolutionary Cells helped carry out the 1972 murder of Israeli Olympians in Munich.)

"And secondly," Mr. Fischer continues, "I drove five years in the night in Frankfurt in a cab. I had a deep insight into the human character. The Catholic world-view that there is the good and there is the evil is not the reality. Usually in a human being, you have the good and the evil."

He doesn't say but implies that experience in government changed him, too. Having taken office proclaiming high ideals in foreign policy, he saw Mr. Schröder, who led the dominant Social Democrats, elbow his way into foreign affairs, his terrain, in the second term. The chancellor set the tone on Iraq, Europe and Russia--calling Vladimir Putin, famously, a "flawless democrat." "It was never my position," Mr. Fischer retorts, adding (suddenly the diplomat again) that he and Mr. Schröder had "a very realistic view of each other," though "we were never personal friends."

After the 2005 elections produced a split result, both men left politics, Mr. Schröder for a job at Russia's giant gas company Gazprom and Mr. Fischer to consulting and teaching. The current "grand coalition" between the main right and left parties is like "sex between a hippopotamus and an elephant . . . always very awkward," he says. So, Mr. Fischer adds, he's relieved to be an ocean away.





Back in 1986, the former French Maoist philosopher André Glucksmann--who is "the looniness of 1968 repentant" in Paul Berman's phrase--told Mr. Fischer in a German newspaper debate that one of the left's gravest sins is the "refusal to acknowledge the possibility of evil." Mr. Fischer doesn't apologize for his past, and the Glucksmann gibe, coming from a friend, still rankles. "As a good Catholic grown up in a deep Catholic environment, I couldn't understand what he's talking about that I don't believe in evil." In realist mode, he says, "It's not in our hands to defeat the evil; it's in our hands to limit it."
Mr. Fischer was born to a Hungarian-German family of butchers in Bavaria, but realized "very early" that he wanted a different life. "Maybe I kept my butcher style in politics," he jokes. "Some of my enemies said that." (As foreign minister, he was criticized for arrogance by the media, and in turn once called reporters "nothing but five-mark whores"; he tells me he only had one specific journalist in mind.)

In his most radical days, Mr. Fischer says he was never anti-American "in a cultural sense." "Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin," he eyes light up, "I can't deny that!"

For him, 1968 broke up "the old authoritarian Germany" and brought a new whiff of "freedom," with women's lib for example. Asked what the year's true legacy is, he throws up his hands, like many others. "I still try to figure it out," he says. " '68 will never end. Everybody always says blame '68 for this or that. But it's still going on."

At a recent Rolling Stones concert in Berlin, he noticed three generations were in the audience enjoying the show. To him, the scene showed how that year changed the world. "It was impossible that I would have gone with my father and grandfather to a concert," he says.

After this academic year, Mr. Fischer will go home to Berlin and Europe, which "is in a very messy situation." We talk about the new generation of street protestors on the Continent who proclaim their sympathy for Hezbollah and disgust for America. Sometimes it looks like it's gone full circle, back to simple slogans and a flirtation with terrorism. "To see America as the country of the evil, that's terribly wrong," he says.

So is today's left repeating old mistakes? "Every generation has to make its own experience," he says, without wanting to continue down this path. Lunch at the University Club awaits, and Mr. Fischer--'60s rabble-rouser, Green, idealist, foreign minister, realist--walks out the cafe and back toward the Princeton campus.

  Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.-------------- Original message from a.gronowicz at att.net: -------------- 


  Let him offer his reasons given the facts I have presented.  


  It would also be good to have before us the position of the Colombian Greens on the Middle East, Georgia, etc.  


  We already know that five of the six Green parties in Europe that entered into center-right coalitions that seriously compromised the four pillars.    


  Tony


  P.S. Are observers on this list supposed to post?
    -------------- Original message from Mike Feinstein <mfeinstein at feinstein.org>: -------------- 


    > I forwarded this resolution to Juan Carlos Lecompte, who is a Colombian 
    > Green and the husband of Ingrid Betancourt. 
    > 
    > This was his response: 
    > 
    > "Hi Mike,you are right, i think is a good idea.Juan C." 
    > _______________________________________________ 
    > usgp-int mailing list 
    > usgp-int at gp-us.org 
    > http://forum.greens.org/mailman/listinfo/usgp-int 


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