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5 GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED
ALLY PART 1: Readiness for endless
war By Axel Brot
Not so
many years ago, many hoped Europe might step up as
a counterweight to US imperial policies. Such
hopes were focused in particular on Germany - not
only as the leading European power, but as a known
moderating, non-military force in international
politics.
US vituperation of the reputed
European preference for diplomacy and peaceful
conflict resolution as well as official Britain,
in the
person of Richard Cooper,
former prime minister Tony Blair's
international-relations guru, deemed it necessary
to lecture "post-industrial Europe" about the need
for "double standards" and colonial ruthlessness
to beat down benighted non-Westerners, seemed to
give substance to these hopes.
Well,
Germany and the European Union did step up - but
rather differently than expected. And it was no
electoral twitch that set the stage for "better be
wrong with the United States than being right
against it". Since Angela Merkel's visit to
Washington (as the conservative opposition leader)
on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, to denounce
then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's decision to
oppose the war, the return to US good graces was
not only the main conservative foreign-policy
project; it turned rapidly into the supreme
project of the German political class - including
the Social Democrats.
Merkel became the
chancellor-to-go-to, the most trusted European
interlocutor for the US political class to work
jointly and determinedly to harden US global
hegemony against the consequences of America's
Iraq-inflicted weakness - this not only in the
wider Middle East but also, and especially, with
regard to Russia and China, the Bush
administration's original enemy of choice before
the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" consumed so
much of its political capital.
Overcoming
the domestic constraints on its ability to use the
German army more extensively for "humanitarian
interventions", for the defense of "Western
civilization" against Islamist terrorism, is an
important, though not the most important, part of
the Merkel government's "the West united behind
the US" policy. Notwithstanding the absence of
public debate on its strategic implications - eg,
of the US (and Israeli) doctrine of preventive
war, the abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's geographical restrictions, the
mission of "securing access to raw materials" -
the rejection on general principles of a more
activist military role by a majority of Germans
has not (yet) been overcome.
This has
far-reaching consequences: it has, in a
significant way, rebooted German elite attitudes
and expectations toward the EU, and toward
Germany's relationship with France. The public
discourse about foreign policy as well as the
underlying elite mindset is changing - from
"responsibly conservative" to the channeling of
the demons Hannah Arendt dealt with in her search
for the origins of 20th-century disorder:
(British) imperialism, Western militarism and
racism. And since the majority of Germans is
(again) far behind the curve of elite opinion, the
efforts of "re-educating" them (as Der Spiegel
recently demanded again) are as consistently
strident as they are mythologizing.
But
there are also quite a number of senior officials
and politicians, still serving or retired, who are
looking with dismay or worry at the evolution of
German policies in response to the crisis of
US-German relations. Their publicly voiced
concerns are focused on the expansion of German
military commitments - of the easy to get into,
but next to impossible to get out of sort - and
the rapid deterioration of relations with Russia.
In addition, among the small number of
senior experts on international economics, a
majority are looking with deep foreboding at the
mounting instabilities of the international
financial system. They see them driven by the huge
trade imbalances of the US and the growing threat
to leverage them against the creditor nations - in
particular against China, Russia, and the members
of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries that are running large surpluses.
The US congressionally mandated financial
sanctions against such countries as Iran, Syria,
Cuba and North Korea are taken, moreover, as
indicators that the United States is about to
destroy the trust the international financial
system is based upon. The consequences of its
eventual - sooner rather than later - meltdown
will be dramatic and uncontrollable.
These
warning voices are, though, in the wings of the
German debate. The stage is held by the narrative
of the terrorist menace. But there are very few
serious experts who sincerely believe that
Islamist terrorism is motivated by their hate for
"Western freedoms and values". Hate and the desire
for revenge are certainly crucial elements; but
this has not much to do with Western culture or
with the alleged humiliating realization of Muslim
inferiority.
If one should be looking for
causes, the decades of violence the West visited
upon these countries, either directly or through
its dependent regimes, is a necessary part of the
explanation. The other part, of course, would have
to face the fact that it was the West that
transformed weak and isolated fundamentalist cells
into its terrorist Golem. It nurtured, trained,
financed, organized and used it for decades in
terror campaigns against secular nationalist and
socialist regimes and movements until those were
defeated or isolated, leaving their compromised
remnants to do the Western bidding.
Though
Germany was not in the forefront of Middle East
meddling, it was fully engaged in creating and
empowering a Wahhabi-Salafist coalition to fight
the Soviets and the communist regime in
Afghanistan - the central front in the global
anti-communist offensive that appeared to have
turned terrorism on three continents into the
Western weapon of choice.
And for the
Middle East this still seems to be the case. It is
seen in the Western use of Sunni terror groups
(and the anti-Iranian-government
Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, as well as the Iranian sister
organization of the Kurdistan Workers Party)
against Iran, and against the ascendent Shi'ites
in Lebanon.
But the mythologization of
al-Qaeda and the "clash (in German, war) of
civilizations" serves to legitimize the readiness
for endless war. In the words of a retired German
official: "We have been walking the world over the
cliff, and are falling into a sea of blood."
All of this does not only involve
ideological re-rigging. In the US wake, Germany is
running up the pennant of permanent war. The
following should serve to provide a view into some
of its particulars.
The German-French
tandem Since 1966, after France left the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military
integration, Germany has been France's primary
partner, and the French-German tandem was the
active core that drove the European Economic
Community toward the European Union. Germany
handled the tension between its close relationship
with the US and the one with France by
compartmentalizing: with France, Europe; with the
US, NATO and security.
But notwithstanding
the efforts to prevent conflicts developing
between these two poles of German foreign policy,
there was always a strong tendency within the
German political class to regard the process of
European integration as leading toward an
increasing autonomy of European interests and
policies from those of the US. The US did not see
it differently - particularly after the end of the
Cold War. The administrations of Bill Clinton and
George H W Bush invested, therefore, a lot of
political capital and cunning to prevent that from
occurring. Both administrations considered the
European relationship with Russia as the key for
the viability of such a project and the EU's and
NATO's new east European members as the lever to
assure its abortion.
But with the alliance
crisis of 2002-03 - also, depending on the
perspective, the apogee or the nadir of the
French-German duo - the US was able to mobilize
not only the political elites of the new
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