Page 2 of
5 GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED
ALLY PART 1:
Readiness for endless war By
Axel Brot
NATO - and EU - members
of eastern Europe as well as those of Denmark, the
Netherlands and Spain against the specter of an
independent European course. It was the revolt of
the French and German US-oriented elites -
expressing itself publicly in an incessant and
thorough media campaign - that sealed its fate.
All of a sudden, the German-French special
relationship had lost much of its salience. The
horizon of the kind of European
integration the United States
considered a threat to its own international role
revealed itself as much more of a mirage than it
appeared before it was put to the test.
Chancellor Merkel is the German
incarnation of this revolt. And the lionized
champion of the collective European right, the
Americans, and the Israelis, Nicolas Sarkozy, is
the ideal French president for turning Merkel's
great foreign-policy project into a joint venture:
welding the EU to the US, making European
integration serve the US-dominated, Western
international order - whatever the cost.
It is not as if former French president
Jacques Chirac and his foreign and military policy
bureaucracies had still been able to put the
brakes on Merkel. After confronting the US on the
Iraq issue in 2002-03, together with
then-chancellor Schroeder, and having maneuvered
Russian President Vladimir Putin into taking the
same stance, Chirac's political will was exhausted
and prospects for a more independent European road
in international politics was dead. Schroeder's
capacity to act in tandem with Chirac was
increasingly circumscribed by his domestic
weakness; and the US reminded the French
administration forcefully of what it means to play
hardball with French interests. He was stymied,
like Schroeder, by the
neo-conservative/neo-liberal, US-oriented majority
of the elites.
After 2003, French policies
followed Germany somewhat listlessly in supporting
the US ones, in particular in the wider Middle
East - though still trying to play their own game
in Lebanon, while egging on the Americans and
Israelis against Syria and Iran. Nevertheless,
while conceding the game in the Middle East,
Chirac and Schroeder still tried to create a
stable framework of relations with Russia and
China, the basis of something like a Eurasian
common economic region. This notion has already
joined the might-have-beens of history.
Neither would have led the election of
Sarkozy's competitor, Segolene Royal, to a greatly
different conception of French foreign policy.
Royal was groomed by Francois Mitterrand, the
Socialist president who had brought to perfection
the art of decorating with left-wing flourishes an
exceedingly hard-nosed, rather vicious,
covert-operations approach to foreign policy.
In fact, the different versions of the
French Socialist Party after World War II were
never known for particularly salubrious policies:
from their alliance with the Corsican heroin mafia
in Marseilles to their support of French colonial
wars, from bombing Greenpeace ships to involvement
in the Ruanda genocide. There is nothing
surprising, therefore, that both Royal and Sarkozy
are close to the particularly shrill French
version of "humanitarian interventionists",
drawing from the same stock of civilizational
warriors that dominates French public discourse.
Sarkozy's choice for foreign minister,
Bernard Kouchner, is therefore less of a peace
offering to the Socialists than an indicator of
ideological commitments. Kouchner is not only one
of the ideological godfathers of
"anti-totalitarian, humanitarian interventionism",
he is also the one under whose benevolent eyes -
in his function as its United Nations
administrator - Kosovo acquired the makings of the
first, ethnically almost pure, European
mafia-state. During the 1980s, some of his
Medecins du Monde (which he founded after
splitting from the Medecins sans Frontières)
assisted the Afghan mujahideen with somewhat more
than medical-only rear services.
Though he
might not be tainted with aiding the Americans (as
some suspected), as other non-governmental
organizations are, in turning the Cambodian
refugee camps in Thailand into bases for the
reconstitution of the Khmer Rouge as US proxies,
his record, nevertheless, justifies Colin Powell's
famous dictum about NGOs as US "force multipliers"
avant la lettre: human rights and medical
services for US friends and clients, none for the
opposition.
Sarkozy's ideological baggage
also contains the French-Israeli business lawyer
Arno Klarsfeld,a rather hysterical campaigner for
the rights of Israel and the defense of Western
civilization as well as the son of noted Nazi
hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. He volunteered
in 2002 to serve in the Israeli Defense Force and
accompanied the Israeli border guards as a member
on their rampage through the Palestinian
territories. Klarsfeld was Sarkozy's leading
candidate for heading the controversial new
Ministry for Immigration and National Identity - a
move comparable to Bush proposing right-wing
Israeli political leader Avigdor Liebermann as the
head of a new department for Hispanics, Muslims
and African-Americans. For the time being, though,
Sarkozy seems to have reconsidered this
exceedingly provocative appointment.
Widely quoted as mentor and inspirer of
Sarkozy's "anti-totalitarian" outlook is
philosopher André Glucksmann: one of the many
minor embodiments of Hannah Arendt's insight about
the French haute bourgeoisie's romantic
infatuation with the rhetorical bombast of
ideological rogues and the titillations of
violence. During the 1980s he marketed nuclear war
as an antidote against the European addiction to
peace and to save humanity - and Western
civilization - from communism. After the Soviet
collapse, he agitated for Europe to join any
American or Israeli war in reach against the "new
Hitlers" (Milosevicz, Saddam Hussein, Arafat,
Assad, etc) and "Islamofascists", as well as for
his kind of moral policies against "totalitarian"
China and "newly-totalitarian" Russia.
These attractions, however, did not remain
limited to the Parisian salons and media: As the
preferred French interlocutor for castigating the
German lack of martial fiber, while in Germany
Glucksmann briefly replaced on "high-brow" TV the
well-respected, though liberal and measured,
specialist on German-French relations, Professor
Alfred Grosser. In 2002, Grosser had committed the
rather deadly mistake of criticizing instead of
defending Israel's right to do as it likes in the
Palestinian territories. He disappeared from
German screens as did many of the German
correspondents of the public media who had failed
to appreciate the Palestinians as the new Nazis.
In view of the fact that most European
mainstream conservative parties (and even some
Social Democratic currents) propagandize the
immigrant issue increasingly in terms of the
"clash of civilizations" and the "new
antisemitism", they have spurred an interesting
change of orientation in the extreme right with
all the potential for open (like in Denmark or
Italy) or tacit alliances (like in Spain).
The extreme right (Front National, Vlaams
Belang, Lega Nord, Allianza Nazionale, Parti van
de Vrijheit etc) and its nebula of goon squads
have also been busy building bridges to Israel and
to
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