They Still Don't Get It
By Peter Ross Range
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The main thing to take from Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's success in playing the Iraq card in September's German election is that the Germans, and most Europeans, still don't get the post-9/11 world. They did not experience the transformative moment that so profoundly changed America. And, absent an attack on their own soil, they're not likely to share America's fundamentally altered notion of national security any time soon.
Most Europeans, and Germans in particular, still see the world through a pre-9/11 lens. That's why Schröder's populist message -- a brilliant, if cynical, political ploy -- so easily took Germans back to their habitual post-World War II pacifism. Schröder's anti-war mantra reawakened a deeply ingrained sentiment that had been more or less repressed during successively deeper German engagements in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Djibouti, and Afghanistan. Those steps were all decisions of the political elite, taken through the Bundestag and the German Constitutional Court. In the election, for the first time in 10 years, the question of whether Germany should participate in an overseas military mission was put to the people -- this was Schröder's canny political instinct -- and the people said no.
It remains to be seen whether Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer -- who had deftly coaxed Germany, especially its left wing, into gradually accepting engagement in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan -- can lead the way back to a "normalized" German involvement in the world. "We've been set back at least to 1997," said Bernhard May of Germany's Council on Foreign Relations. That means pre-Kosovo.
While Germans understand the necessity of combating terrorism, and gradually came to accept the mini-war in Afghanistan (for which Schröder courageously put his government on the line), they still don't see the world as a radically changed place. They cannot, for instance, grasp the Hitler appeasement analogy for Iraq, though Germans should understand it better than any people other than Jews. Americans perceive themselves to be at war. Germans see the war as something that may still come, and they want to avoid it at almost any cost. "To us, war means Dresden," one Greens Party politician told me. (He was born long after the firebombing of Dresden.) In Germany, that trumps any further discussion.
It's important to remember that Germans, like most Europeans, have no worldwide foreign policy. They have some global aspirations, such as permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council, but they have no global vision. Instead, they have interests, they have relationships, and they have a strong notion of process -- of how nations should ideally relate to one another (mainly through international institutions). But they have little developed sense of power and its uses, except to channel it into the kind of entangling alliances like NATO and the European Union that keep countries like Germany from going solo in times of crisis. They've studiously, even obsessively, avoided reaching beyond German borders with anything like advice.
"We have no real view of what should happen in the world," says Christoph Bertram, director of Germany's Institute for International and Security Affairs. "We have ideas, but no clear notion of what we ourselves would do, of how to translate the ideas into policy. We have a functioning decision-making system on things like tariffs, but not in the use of power."
One way to know that Germans still don't get 9/11 is that they often couch their opposition to firm action in Iraq in terms that are more anti-Bush than anti-American. During a long string of conversations in Berlin at election time, my interlocutors always veered quickly from Iraq into a string of Bush administration decisions that they hate: rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, last year's new steel tariffs. Sometimes they mention the Bush administration's desire to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and open up public lands to more logging. The German elites are also mad at us for having the death penalty, right-wing religious nuts, too many McDonald's, and a rotten sense of culture. All these amount to a generalized antipathy for the United States that was ripe for exploiting in a close political campaign.
But what does any of this have to do with going to war against Saddam Hussein? The answer is nothing. Yet the Germans seem unable to distinguish between objectionable environmental and trade policies and desirable security policies. They bundle them all together, and seem to give them equal weight. Americans can disagree with Bush on the ICC and Kyoto but still support him in the essential goal of regime change in Iraq, as Bill Clinton did in his speech to Tony Blair's Labour Party in October in Blackpool, England. Democrats who are often distressed with Mr. Bush's swagger and cowboy language can still separate style from policy.
In Berlin, I often asked Germans how they would feel about Iraq if the president were named Clinton or Gore, and had supported Kyoto and the ICC, but still had the same Iraq policy as Bush. Almost all said: "Oh, that would be different." They've confused the messenger with the message; their problem is Bush, when it should be Saddam Hussein.
Despite their preoccupation with Bush, it is nonetheless true that there's latent anti-Americanism in the German body politic. Its most explicit form is the reflexive rejection by the left of certain American values, economic realities, and lifestyle preferences -- which they derisively label "American conditions," now a negative political code word in Germany.
Yet clearly Germans are conflicted about the United States. From the news bureaus of Unter den Linden to the private dining room of Schröder's Chancellery, I repeatedly heard: "We have an ambivalent relationship with America." Germans have long been America's biggest fans in Europe. They send their children to our universities and put in for postings in the United States. But at the same time, one hears words like inferiority complex, fear of dominance, and the complaint of not being consulted in matters of war and peace.
The lack of nuance in the German perception of U.S. policies is sometimes breathtaking. One of the more preposterous arguments I heard came from a top Schröder advisor during the chancellor's election night party on Sept. 22. "You don't just go roaring into a war you haven't thought about," he said, clearly unacquainted with the debate raging for months in the United States. "And besides, Baghdad is not so far away from us." Right: only about 2,000 miles and light years of involvement.
Such misperceptions are driving a wedge between the United States and its friends in Europe. Our relationships with them are fundamentally shifting, and will probably never be quite the same again. We must hope that the Germans someday grasp the fact that just as Dresden was a defining moment for them -- 130,000 people killed in a single night's bombing -- the 9/11 attacks have become one for us. One can only hope it won't take another Dresden -- or a Paris or Berlin terrorist catastrophe -- to achieve that understanding.
Peter Ross Range is editor of Blueprint.