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3 GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED
ALLY PART 3: Hail to the chief, or
else
Hoisting the
American flag Germany had honed its ability
to fly below the radar of international
controversy to a fine art. Its dependence on
foreign trade for its economic well-being required
this and it resisted, moreover, for most of the
last 40 years rather successfully American
attempts to subject its economic relations with
the world to the more extravagant demands of
economic warfare. No wonder, therefore, that the
detente years of the 1970s and the
globalization of the 1990s
are remembered with fondness. German economic
interests and the philanthropic basso
continuo of its declaratory foreign policy
were in tune. No wonder, too, that Washington
regards these GDP-cored sentimentalities as
completely out-of-tune with rousing the West
against the "enemies of Western values".
After the shocks the German political
class suffered in 2002/2003, it agreed, be it out
of conviction, opportunism or fear, with the views
of the American political class. But as poll after
poll reveals, both have to deal with the fact that
they are the opposite of rather fundamental
attitudes of the majority of Germans. Germany has
gladly internalized what was preached over the
decades in political Sunday sermons about peace
and prosperity, about the role of Germany in the
modern world, its relationship with the West and,
in particular, what kind of society Germany should
aspire to. This message has not only managed to
take hold; it has become the prism through which
many, if not most, Germans look at the world, at
the government, the media - and, not least, at the
US.
This is neither surprising nor
extraordinary. The German lower classes have
always been very reluctant heroes, having been
dragged sullenly into the two world wars. It even
took all the efforts of the Social Democratic and
union leaderships to crush the grassroots movement
for a general strike that was about to disrupt the
mobilization schedule of the German army in the
run-up to World War I; and Nazi domestic
intelligence documented their distinct lack of
enthusiasm when Germany attacked Poland and the
sense of fear and foreboding when Germany went on
to eradicate Jewish Bolshevism.
The German
educated middle classes, still hung over from
their half century of ideological debauch with
its jingoism, imperialism and Nazism, from
Germany's role as a genocidal ogre, and still
remembering its war fright from the 1980s - that,
by the way, had reached deeply into the political
class itself as well as into the senior levels of
the German military - acquired a reflexive
pacifism and take, in general, great satisfaction
in Germany's reputation as a mostly harmless
global social worker. They are, to say the least,
very difficult to get again behind a program of
endless (race) wars, torture and an ideology of
global mayhem. A strong majority may even resist
it actively via another peace movement if the
German government gets too eager, or too blatant,
about demonstrating militarily its commitment to
the global "defense of Western values".
German pundits - "opinion-makers" in
German - take all this as an expression of
deeply-rooted, popular "anti-Americanism", and
anti-Americanism as a facet of anti-semitism, and
both as the resurgence of anti-Western,
pro-totalitarian attitudes. This effort in
guilt-mongering has led to some interesting
myth-making, amusing if it were not so sinister.
Taking their cue from former US defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld's inanity regarding
Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez that "also Hitler
had been elected" by popular vote, those
journalists who read the opinion pages of the
correct American newspapers as well as former
foreign minister Fischer repeated it
enthusiastically and frequently. Notwithstanding
their authority, the historical facts are, of
course, quite different: after his election
setback in 1932, Hitler was not elected but chosen
by a cabal of leaders of right-wing parties,
industry and the media, to head a coalition
government between those parties and the Nazis, to
save the country from the left. Any schoolchild
should know this.
But delegitimizing
"anti-Americanism" seems to require heavy
myth-making because it has turned into a problem
not only for the German political class but for
the whole of the EU. The European populations are,
with a few exceptions, completely out of tune with
the ideological mobilization required to wage
"World War IV". Nevertheless, the change has been
most dramatic in Germany.
The
post-September 11 spike in public support for the
US was not only wiped out by 2002/2003 but the
50-year fund of popular and confident
pro-Americanism had evaporated and given way to
distrust, fear and loathing. The same holds true,
somewhat less dramatically, for attitudes towards
Israel. As a danger to the world, both countries
rank with North Korea and Iran. Russia and China
are still (and stubbornly) regarded as basically
benign and unthreatening.
This is
surprising since even educated Germans tend to
rely for their news on German sources - and have
no access to the many sources of critical news
coverage and opinion still available in the
Western world. One might have expected, therefore,
a quick payoff when public TV as well as the print
media, from high-brow to low-brow, rediscovered
their avocation to educate the German public into
"the Americans may make mistakes, but the others
are incomparably worse".
An ironic or
regretting undertone towards President Bush and
the neoconservatives, and dismay about their
ineptness - frequently slanted as basically
benevolent American naivete - has nevertheless
crept into the presentation of US policy. This
rhetorical flourish connects easily with the
stereotypes of the self-correcting permanence of
American moral leadership, the brutal fanaticism
of Arabs, totalitarian Russians, and ruthless
Chinese, and the almost superhuman difficulties in
finding the right balance between force and
suasion. Nevertheless, the generalized suspicion
that something is wrong - and the distrust of
journalists and politicians - seems to have
resisted up to now the best journalistic efforts.
Since disquiet had spread even among
segments of the high bureaucracy, the leaders of
the German and American political elites moved
quickly and decisively to counter any consequences
the breakdown of the American political image
might have on the attitudes of those eligible for
recruitment into elite functions. A large-scale
program was set in motion to knit young civil
servants, management cadres and promising students
institutionally and socially to their American
counterparts and to expose them to senior
officials of both countries - a kind of
ideological Marshall Plan that saw virtually no
week without an American-German or an American-EU
get-together. Indeed, the German Marshall Fund,
heavily supported by the most prominent German
media conglomerates - together with the
Bertelsmann Foundation - came into its own by
leading it. And more stringently than ever before,
to be considered a "safe" cadre for career
advancement in politics, the civil service, the
media, business and science, requires the aspirant
to have been successfully connected to the right
kind of American or American-German institution at
least once.
Dealing with the reflexive
pacifism and the politically correct
humanitarianism of the majority of Germans is
still a much harder nut to crack. The print media,
in particular the weekly Die Zeit, the flagship of
German neoconservatives, and Der Spiegel, the
middlebrow infotainment weekly, made their
dissatisfaction with their readers repeatedly
clear. And they give a certain depth to the main
subject of political talkshows: the sorry state of
mind of the average German, his lack of
patriotism, his addiction to peace, and his
reactionary notions about the welfare state.
It did not help that several efforts to
reeducate Germans went seriously awry when the
mainstream media (public TV, the German associate
networks of CNN, plus newspapers) gave visibility
and legitimacy to what might be termed the
"occidentalist new right". Their interventions
were so well tuned to American policies and
performance expectations that they confirmed
involuntarily the worst expectations of what was
in the offing.
'Without torture the war
on terror cannot be won' Before the images
of Abu Ghraib helped to visualize what "the gloves
are off" implied, Americans were given the
opportunity to
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