The new monarchies, caught between fixed income and mounting expenses, were forced to devalue their money by diluting its gold content. They began to borrow from private banks to deal with recurring monetary crises. These monetary crises led to constitutional crises that produced absolute monarchies in Europe and the triumph of bourgeois parliamentarianism in England. The need to find new conquered lands to repay sovereign indebtedness gave birth to imperialism and colonialism, which the Atlantic Charter centuries later categorically rejected in the third of its eight points of "common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world". The third point stated that "they [the US and Britain, and later the United Nations members] respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them".
German rearmament to defend neo-imperialism
Notwithstanding the high-sounding rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 provided a propaganda opening for the US to impress on its submissive Western allies in the United Nations that international communism was a clear and present danger to residual Western imperialism and colonialism in the Third World. Under president Harry Truman, the US began to abandon its wartime anti-colonialist posture and to solicit the help of European imperialists, particularly the British and French, to support its global war on communism.
Colonel Harry G Summers Jr, US Army (retired), in an article in Military History magazine titled "The Korean War: A fresh perspective", pointed out that during a post-Cold War Pentagon briefing in 1974, General Vernon Walters, then deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), revealed what amounted to the unpredictability of US policy intentions on Korea: "If a Soviet KGB spy had broken into the Pentagon or the State Department on June 25, 1950, and gained access to our most secret files, he would have found the US had no interest at all in Korea. But the one place he couldn't break into was the mind of Harry Truman, and two days later America went to war over Korea."
Truman, unprepared for global leadership, insecure and paranoid, fell under the spell of Winston Churchill, who, borrowing from Lenin, equated anti-imperialism with anti-capitalism. Churchill aimed at using the Cold War as a device to save European imperialism by offering the fruits of neo-imperialism to the US in the name of democracy. In taking the United States to war in Korea, Truman, in addition to placing the US firmly on the side of imperialists, made two critical decisions that would shape future US military actions.
First, he decided to fight the war under the auspices of the United Nations, a pattern followed by president Lyndon B Johnson in the Vietnam War in 1964, president George H W Bush in the Gulf War in 1991, by president Bill Clinton in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999, and by President George W Bush in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. Second, for the first time in US military history, Truman decided to take the nation to war without first asking Congress for a declaration of war. Using the UN Security Council resolution as his authority, he said the conflict in Korea was not a war but a "police action". With the Soviet Union then boycotting the Security Council, the United States was able to gain approval of UN resolutions labeling the North Korean invasion a "breach of the peace" and urging all members to aid South Korea, notwithstanding that both North and South Korea had been aiming for unification by force for several years.
Another consequence of the Korean War was damage to the image of the UN as a neutral world body. Secretary general Trygve Lie was forced to resign over Soviet complaints of the way he manipulated Security Council procedures to comply with US dictates.
Colonel Summers pointed out that, in reality, UN involvement was a facade for unilateral US action to protect its vital interests in northeast Asia. The UN Command was just another name for General Douglas MacArthur's US Far East Command in Tokyo. At its peak strength in July 1953, the UN Command stood at 932,539 ground troops. Republic of Korea (ROK) army and marine forces accounted for 590,911 of that force, and US Army and Marine Corps forces for another 302,483. By comparison, other UN ground forces totaled 39,145 men, 24,085 of whom were provided by British Commonwealth Forces (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and 5,455 of whom came from Turkey. The troop composition was similar to that of the "coalition of the willing" in the 2003 Iraq war. While the UN facade was detrimental to the prestige of the UN, Truman's decision not to seek a declaration of war set a dangerous precedent in the erosion of the constitutional power of the US Congress.
Claiming that their war-making authority rested in their power as commanders-in-chief, both Johnson and Nixon refused to ask Congress for approval to wage war in Vietnam, a major factor in undermining popular support for that conflict. In the entire history of the United States, only seven wars had been declared by Congress, with World War II the last declared war. Ten other wars were not declared: the Florida Seminole Wars, 1817-58; the Civil War, 1861-65; the Korean War, 1950-53; the Vietnam War, 1964-72; the first Gulf War, 1991; the war on drugs, 1980s to the present; the Kosovo war, 1999; the "war on terror", 2001 to the present; Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), 2001; and the second Gulf war (Iraq), 2003. Instead of formal war declarations, the US Congress has issued authorizations of force. Such authorizations have included the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 that officially initiated US participation in the Vietnam War, and the "use-of-force" resolution that started the 2003 Iraq war. Questions remain as to the legality of these authorizations of force.
Ironically, the Federal Republic of Germany, whose own empire had been partitioned out of existence since the end of World War I, was pushed to contribute financially to its own defense against Soviet threat so that its less prosperous but victorious imperialist allies, Britain and France, could spend their hard-pressed resources to defend their crumbling empires outside of Europe in the name of democracy.
For West Germany, five years after having lost the most devastating of all wars, this meant forming a new army, a step unthinkable for many Germans who had just gone through de-Nazification and demilitarization indoctrination during Allied occupation. But the worldwide "Korean War boom" of 1950 came at exactly the right moment for an export-addicted Germany eager to capture new overseas markets. As West Germany prospered from profits garnered from new wars to defend imperialism in Asia, the US was in a position to push Germany into rearmament, despite the fact that German rearmament was anathema not only to German citizens, but also to all their apprehensive neighbors, especially France. As the Korean War continued, however, opposition to rearmament lessened within West Germany, and China's entry into the war caused Gaullist France, which was apprehensive of the liberating impact of Asian communism on its crumbling empire in Southeast Asia, to revise its negative posture toward German rearmament, as long as the new German war machine was oriented toward the east. Instead of the tradition Franco-Russian alliance against a powerful Germany, the French began to see benefits in using the Germans to deter Soviet intentions to march toward Paris. It was a classic balance-of-power move. Germany, deprived of sovereign authority, was at the mercy of superpower global conflict.
To contain a newly armed Germany, French officials proposed the creation of the European Defense Community (EDC) under the aegis of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but with strengthened European control, with a European Army to run in parallel with the European Steel and Coal Community that France and Germany had formed earlier. Within the EDC context was the need to rearm West Germany to counter the Soviet Union's overwhelming superiority in military manpower. Adenauer quickly agreed to join the EDC because he saw membership as likely to enhance the eventual full restoration of German sovereignty. The treaties establishing the EDC were signed in May 1952 in Bonn by the Western Allies and West Germany. Britain refused to be part of it, seeing its armed forces as being more important to NATO, the Commonwealth and the special relationship with the US than to Europe.
Arguments arose over who would have ultimate control over the army - would it be the EDC or would it be the national governments? The whole idea eventually fell apart, although West Germany was welcomed into NATO and the West European Union (WEU) was created. Although the German Bundestag ratified the treaties, the EDC was ultimately blocked by the French National Assembly, because it opposed putting French troops under foreign command. The French veto meant that Adenauer's attempt to regain German sovereignty through disguised militarism had failed and a new formula was needed to allay French fears of a strong Germany.
The failed negotiations surrounding the planned rearmament of West Germany through the creation of the EDC nevertheless provoked a Soviet countermeasure. After a second East German proposal for talks on a possible unification of the two German states failed because of West Germany's demands for free elections in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Soviet Union put forth a new proposal to its wartime Western Allies in March 1952. The Soviet Union would agree to German unification if the Oder-Neisse border were recognized as final and if a unified Germany were to remain neutral. If the proposal were accepted, Allied troops would leave Germany within one year, and a united neutral Germany would obtain its full sovereignty.
The offer, directed to the Western Allies rather than Germany, which, deprived of sovereignty, had no authority to negotiate its own fate, nevertheless aroused lively public discussion in West Germany about the country's political future. Adenauer was afraid that neutrality would mean Germany's exclusion from US-dominated Western Europe and that without US support, he and his conservative Christian Democrats might not stay in power, in view of the traditional strength of the Social Democrats or, worse, the communists. Encouraged by the United States, Adenauer demanded free elections in all of Germany as a precondition for negotiations, a demand he knew was unacceptable to both the Soviets and East Germany, as Western-style elections would be financed by money from the US to ensure the defeat of communist and socialist candidates, repeating the postwar political sham in both West Germany and Japan. The Soviet Union declined and abandoned its proposal. Adenauer was harshly criticized by the opposition for not having seized this opportunity for unification. By allying itself with the US, West Germany sacrificed its unification with East Germany for half a century. A divided Germany provided a balance-of-power arrangement between the two superpowers all through the Cold War.
Adenauer's decision to turn down the Soviet proposal left Germany divided for the then foreseeable future. West Germany was then expected to remain firmly anchored in the Western defense community. Yet doubt remained in Washington on whether Germans would kill other Germans to protect US interests in Europe.
After plans for the EDC failed because of the French veto, negotiations were successfully concluded on the Treaties of Paris in May 1954, which ended the Occupation Statute and made West Germany a member of the Western European Union and of NATO. NATO was the vehicle to camouflage US geopolitical interests in Europe with a common goal among the Western Allies against Soviet communism. On May 5, 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany declared its sovereignty as a state and, as a new member of NATO, undertook to contribute to the organization's defense effort by building up its own armed forces, the Bundeswehr. German rearmament was to be camouflaged under the NATO umbrella. West German soldiers could now be counted on to fight East German soldiers to protect Western Europe against communism. Militarism was the price the United States extracted for granting Germany a facade of independent sovereignty, but not yet full independence of foreign or security policy, as NATO continued to be dominated by the US, with its mission framed by US geopolitical interests.
The buildup of the Bundeswehr met considerable popular opposition within West Germany. To avoid isolating the army from the country's civilian and political life, as was the case historically up to the fall of the Weimar Republic, laws were passed that guaranteed civilian control over the armed forces and gave the individual soldier a new social status. Members of the conscription army were to be "citizens in uniform" and were encouraged to take an active part in democratic politics, in contrast to the Junker tradition of a warrior class. This was done to inject a measure of consideration of German domestic politics into US-dominated NATO decision-making.
By 1955, the Soviet Union had abandoned efforts to secure a neutralized united Germany. After the Four Power Conference in Geneva in July that year, Adenauer accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, seeking to open new lines of communication with the East without compromising West German commitments to the West. On the other side, Moscow wanted to exploit German apprehension of being in the front line of hostility to create a voice of caution within NATO. In Moscow in September, Adenauer arranged for the release of 10,000 German war prisoners in the Soviet Union. In addition, without having recognized the division of Germany or the Oder-Neisse line as permanent, West German negotiators also established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union recognized the German Democratic Republic as a sovereign state in 1954, and the two communist countries established diplomatic relations. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had not, however, recognized the GDR. And to dissuade other countries from recognizing East Germany, Adenauer's foreign policy adviser, Walter Hallstein, proposed that the FRG break diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the GDR. Anti-communism was the convenient decoy from targeting the rise of neo-fascism in a society that had won a permissive reprieve from its US conqueror's de-Nazification program. As the brilliant German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder showed in many of his films, postwar Germany turned out to be very much what it would have been like if the Nazis had won the war.
The Hallstein proposal was based on the West German claim that as a democratic state, it should be accepted as the only legitimate representative of the German people. By contrast, East Germany claimed to be the legitimate state of the German people because it was a dictatorship of the proletariat. Democracy was used as a justification for legitimacy in the West. Israel would learn from the former persecutor of its people to use democracy to bargain for US acceptance of its legitimacy in an Arab region, using anti-communism as currency to secure US support, by purging the left totally from Israeli domestic politics. The Hallstein Doctrine was adopted as a principle of West German foreign policy in September 1955 and remained in effect until the late 1960s when the idea of two German states became a reality, and Germany remained divided until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Unfortunately, whereas militarism under market capitalism stimulated economic expansion by providing profit to private enterprise, it operated to drain prosperity under communism, which could not find a vehicle to recycle financial energy consumed by the arms race. Militarism then was co-opted by finance capitalism as an effective weapon against communism, which was an economic system that could only be operative in peace. The reason war has not ended even after the global war on communism has ended with the dissolution of the USSR is because militarism and capitalism have a mutual dependency. The end of the Cold War, while marking the failure of peaceful communism, marked the triumph of capitalistic militarism.
Traditionally, European integration and trans-Atlantic relations have been the two key components of postwar German foreign policy. German trans-Atlantic relations are a euphemism for German acceptance of US dominance. Both components were strategic necessities for the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, and at the same time paved the way for West Germany to rejoin the European community of nations. Since then, the US had been Germany's protector ally both in and outside Europe. This relationship remained after German unification.
Today, while the US and Germany continue to share similar views on a range of global issues such as terrorism, WMD (weapons of mass destruction) proliferation and regional conflicts, there is increasing divergence on what constitute proper policy responses to these new threats and challenges. Germany subscribes to multilateralism as a fundamental component of its foreign policy in a multipolar world. Differences on issues such as Iraq, Iran, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the Ottawa Convention have surfaced between the US and Germany as the latter regains more of its full sovereignty and as its domestic politics turns centrist as opposed to US unilateralism. Strategically, German relations with China and Russia are evolving along lines more independent from US policies.
During the Cold War, trans-Atlantic relations in the West were dominated by the need to defend the US and Western Europe jointly against the Soviet threat. This was also the reason for US forces to remain in Europe via NATO. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the threat posed by the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union disappeared overnight. Since then, trans-Atlantic relations have faced new challenges devoid of a common thread.
Having contained domestic terrorism on its own soil, Germany, like many other nations, is being pressured by the United States to join in the "global war on terrorism" as a replacement of the threat from global communism. International terrorism, which also put a new dimension on the problem of WMD proliferation, created a demand from the US for German military projection beyond German borders, along with regional conflicts that allegedly had supra-regional destabilizing effects, eg the Balkans, the Middle East, Congo, Afghanistan, India-Pakistan. This definition of supra-regional stability can involve Germany in distant conflicts around the globe, since no regional conflict can remain isolated in an interconnected global security network. The process of greater European integration has spilled beyond historical European borders into the Crimea and the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Yet domestic threats from international terrorism can be intensified by a country's military involvement beyond its borders, as demonstrated by the terrorist bombing of trains in Spain in response to deployment of Spanish troops in Iraq.
As early as 1990, the European Union and the United States agreed in the Transatlantic Declaration to establish a closely meshed network of twice-yearly summit consultations. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that security policy and trans-Atlantic cooperation have not been removed with the end of East-West conflict. Yet the nature of the cooperation has undergone a fundamental change: comprehensive security implies that internal and external security threats are interconnected. There is also a historical legacy that set German relations with Islamic nations apart from the Anglo-US legacy. Competition for the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples had been a focus of the contest between Germany and the Western Allies in the two World Wars.
With the US drifting toward a policy of relying on its super-power to impose a global geopolitical, economic and financial architecture to its liking, a critical divergence has emerged between the US and its NATO allies over the need for conflict prevention and the most effective paths of conflict resolution. US responses to terrorism threats, as manifested in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, if not Afghanistan, have created policy rifts between the EU and the US.
With the end of the Soviet threat to Western Europe, US planners began to ask whether the United States would always have to deploy troops and equipment to sort out Europe's problems. Consequently, the US was looking to Western Europe to take more responsibility for its own defense and security. It has also become harder for US policymakers to justify spending considerable amounts of money on overseas deployments. Equally, the US remains hesitant over overseas deployments because of experiences and lessons from the Vietnam War. Despite being the main contributor to Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf during 1991, the later debacle of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia only reinforced US objections to its their ground forces in international hotspots.
For the United States, modern warfare or military operations have to be conducted with minimum risk to US lives. When the US refused to deploy peacekeepers to UN operations in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during 1992-95, or make the ground-force option available during Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999, many Western European governments wondered whether the United States could always be counted on if military intervention were needed in an international crisis. Many were now asking the same questions as the French had asked years before: Why should an economically and politically powerful Western Europe not take more responsibility for its own security, especially as there was no longer the threat from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact?
As a result, Western Europe had begun to develop a European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI) since the early 1990s. In 1993, the EU decided to embody parts of the Petersberg Tasks into the Treaty on the European Union. This gave the WEU, Western Europe's own security apparatus within NATO, a clear defined role in humanitarian and conventional operations. The WEU was strengthened. Among other changes, this included the appointment of a secretary general and a planning cell that were responsible for assessing and planning for operations as they arose. The number of troops available to it was also increased. If necessary, the WEU could call on other NATO units such as the UK/Netherlands Landing Force. It also had its own rapid-response unit, EUROFOR, which was made up of troops from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It was envisaged that the WEU would act independently or as part of a UN force in humanitarian operations in which the US would not want to become involved. In other operations, it would act as part of NATO. Both the US and Western Europe believed that the proposals would strengthen NATO by providing better cooperation and coordination, a problem NATO had suffered from in multinational operations.
In 1999, however, the EU decided to revise the WEU plans. It decided to adopt the crisis-management and conflict-prevention elements itself. The WEU would remain as an organization but would mostly concentrate on being a contribution to NATO during a conventional war. At the European Council's Cologne Summit in June 1999, the EU launched the Common European Security and Defense Policy (CESDP). A later summit at Helsinki built on Cologne and defined new EU structures to undertake the crisis-management role. Both summits also proposed an EU Rapid Reaction Force that would draw mostly on the member states' commitments that had already been made to the WEU after the Petersberg Tasks - the force levels being agreed at the Military Capabilities Conference in November 2000.
The EU force is not a European Army in the sense of a standing army. It follows a similar character to NATO's Allied Command Europe (ACE) Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) in which certain elements of member states' armed forces are earmarked for rapid deployment if the need arises. Only one part of the force could be considered a standing army. In 1987, France and Germany decided to create a Security and Defense Council (SDC) that would allow for better coordination on joint Franco-German operations as part of the WEU and later NATO. In 1991, both countries decided to back up the SDC with a joint Franco-German brigade directly responsible to the EU and the WEU (and NATO from 1993) - this became known as the Eurocorps. Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg then went on to join, allowing the WEU to call on a sizable force for immediate deployment. With its headquarters in Strasbourg, the Eurocorps has since deployed to Bosnia and Kosovo and is likely to feature in the new EU force.
Germany goes its own way
The EU created the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) to ensure independent control of its security policy. The United States views the ESDP as an attempt to replace NATO by creating a security and defense system free of US dominance if not involvement. Changing its Cold War role of an economic giant and a geopolitical pigmy, drawing on the lesson of Iraq, Germany, the dominant component in the EU, has taken on the task of trying to prevent a military confrontation between the US and Iran. The European initiative, led by Germany, France and an ambiguously European Britain, proposes to give Iran substantial economic benefits in exchange for Iranian commitment to cease efforts to become a nuclear power. This initiative has received little support either from Iranian domestic politics or from the US. Washington views the European initiative with skeptical contempt. US hawks want "regime change" and/or a "surgical strike" against Iranian nuclear facilities. The EU views both options as ineffective, based on what has transpired in Iraq, since Iranian nuclear facilities are both dispersed and hardened, and since the US faces a severe shortage of troops because of its aggressive foreign policy, a problem that NATO is not at all keen to help resolve with its own troops.
German officials point out that their country's Iran initiative is a breakthrough, since for the first time in recent memory the leading European powers are united and proactive, as well as independent from Washington, on a major issue that threatens peace. There is sober concern about Iran playing off the US against Europe. German officials see their role as demonstrating that there are diplomatic alternatives to a repeat of US Iraq policy in Iran. If the EU approach to Iran should break down, the EU, being still economically dependent on the US, would have no choice but to join the United States in economic sanctions against Iran. Diplomatically, the EU would still be in a position to dissuade the Bush administration from pursuing a military option or seeking Security Council action that Russia and China could be expected to oppose.
Since the end of World War II, nothing major has happened on the world stage, good or bad, unless the United States has orchestrated it. The only two notable exceptions are chancellor Willy Brandt's efforts more than two decades ago to engage the Soviet Union and East Germany, and British and French diplomatic efforts that helped produce the deal to trade an end of Libyan terrorism for an end to economic and diplomatic sanctions.
Washington at first reacted negatively to both of these initiatives. European involvement in world affairs beyond continental borders has been welcomed by Washington only when Europe served as a docile junior partner to US geopolitical designs. On Iraq, most of Europe refused to accept this subservient role. The Iraq war is immensely unpopular in Europe, similarly to other regions around the globe, even in Britain, which has happily accepted the role of geopolitical water boy for US foreign policy since the end of World War II. German domestic politics does not give Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder an option to support the Bush administration's Iraq policy. The blatant ineptitude of recent US foreign policy, particularly in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, has provided a window of opportunity for European independent activism in world affairs.
The re-election of Schroeder as chancellor of Germany with the help of the Green Party in September 2002 symbolized the end of an era in close, albeit unequal, postwar relations between the US and Germany. Schroeder held on to power after his SPD (Sozial-demokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Social Democrat Party), ran an intensely anti-US campaign based upon opposition to US policy on Iraq. The SPD was tied with the conservative, pro-US CDU-CSU (Christian Democrats), each getting 38.5% of the votes in an election in which 80% of eligible voters took part. But with the support of the Green Party's 8.6% vote, Schroeder defeated Edmond Stoiber, the CDU candidate, by fewer than 9,000 votes over the conservative coalition, giving the SPD-Green coalition 306 seats in the 603-seat parliament. The generally conservative German press referred to the winning coalition derogatorily as the Red-Green Coalition. The German Greens are a party of ecology and used to be a pacifist party until their chairman, Joschka Fischer, won a battle between the realists and the fundamentalists and got the party to back German troops going into Kosovo.
The re-election of Schroeder has been tremendously damaging to the carefully nurtured five-decade-old US-German alliance. After Schroeder's victory, a curt statement from the White House did not congratulate him, or even mention him by name. It was a marked contrast to a statement congratulating French President Jacques Chirac, with whom Washington also has serious diplomatic problems, on his May re-election. The White House also declined to arrange a personal telephone call between Schroeder and Bush. In the view of the US, Schroeder and key members of his cabinet played to anti-US sentiment in Germany over foreign-policy issues during the final weeks of the campaign beyond election politics to the point of personal attacks on the US president.
Politically, the Bush administration at the time leading up to the Iraq invasion wanted Germany to join its international coalition to support its disastrous policy on Iraq, with diplomatic backing at the UN, and to grant the "coalition of the willing" complete access to German airspace and allow the US and Britain full use of their bases on German soil for offensive operations against Iraq. The White House also wanted Germany to support more fully Washington's "war on terrorism", especially with regard to the extradition of terrorist suspects on German soil, even those with German citizenship, and the release of crucial evidence that could be used to help convict them in US courts. It also wanted Germany to increase defense spending, which had fallen to just 1.5% of its GDP, and to pay for costs associated with increased terrorism security at US bases in Germany. The US has warned that if the German government continues to hinder US policy toward Iraq and elsewhere, such as Iran and in the UN, Washington may conclude that Berlin is reneging on its defense-treaty obligations, which would have serious political consequences, beyond being labeled the "old Europe". US support for German membership in the UN Security Council hangs in the balance.
With the creation of NATO in April 1949, the US and Germany formally became military allies. It was a turning point for both. For the first time in its history, the United States had signed on to a permanent alliance that linked it to Europe's defense; and for Germany, as for Italy, membership in NATO signaled a new acceptance internationally, an important political legitimacy for a nation with an embarrassing past. It was an alliance relationship that remained solidly operative throughout the decades of the Cold War, as a succession of German leaders, from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl, remained determinedly pro-US in their policies. The US views Schroeder as having placed in jeopardy this historically close relationship for shortsighted political gain.
Germany, on the other hand, merely sees itself as finally acting as an independent nation with full sovereignty responsive to its social-democratic heritage. The new independent Germany will support US policies that converge with German national interests and values and opposed those that diverge from them. From this point on, no German politician can afford to play the role of collaborator to US occupation on the Adenauer rationalization that it would buy better treatment from the occupier. The Germans have been occupiers and they know from first-hand experience that collaborators enjoy no respect from anyone, least of all from the occupiers.
Schroeder has stated unequivocally that Germany would not participate in US-led military action in Iraq. In his first successful election campaign in September 1998, he declared that "this country under my leadership is not available for adventure". In reference to Germany's $9 billion contribution to funding the first Gulf War, Schroeder warned that "the time of checkbook diplomacy is over once and for all". During the Cold War, checkbook diplomacy for West Germany meant to give money in place of sending German troops. It remains unclear if the end of checkbook diplomacy according to Schroeder means acceptance of a revival of German militarism or merely refusal to pay the bill for US militarism, something Saudi Arabia has never dared to do. To buy their precarious security, the Saudis have been forced to pay all sides in complex Mid-East politics.
The first months of Schroeder's chancellorship were marked by policy disputes with his more strongly socialist finance minister (and Social Democratic party chairman) Oskar Lafontaine, who was SPD regional chairman in 1977 and premier of the Saar in 1985. A leader of his party's "peace faction" in the early 1980s, Lafontaine denounced chancellor Helmut Schmidt's nuclear policy, calling for German withdrawal from NATO. He was seen as the party's "conceptual pioneer", who would redefine its policies on unemployment and the environment. He opposed the German reunification agreement negotiated by chancellor Helmut Kohl, but lost support within the SPD. Lafontaine was defeated in the December 1990 election, having survived an assassination attempt in April. In 1995, he became national chairman of the SPD. Returned to parliament, Lafontaine became finance minister in the Schroeder government in 1998, but clashes over policy caused him to resign the ministry, his SPD leadership, and his parliamentary seat in March 1999.
Schroeder succeeded Lafontaine as party chairman. However, after the Social Democrats' subsequent series of electoral defeats on the state level, Schroeder moved to shore up his standing with the left. But economic problems forced him in 2000 to reduce individual and corporate income taxes and positioned the Social Democrats as a "modernizing force" in German politics. Internationally, Schroeder's pursued a less EU-centered and NATO-dependent foreign policy than his predecessor, establishing good relations with Russia and China. He also supported the US in its "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan, which strained relations with the Green Party, his main coalition partner.
The Social Democrats' electoral setbacks in the 2002 elections initially led Schroeder to move forward more modestly with reforms in his second term, despite Germany's weak economy, and late in 2003 he secured passage of supply-side tax cuts and anti-labor laws intended to revive the economy. Rank-and-file unhappiness with his reform program forced Schroeder to resign as party chairman in 2004.
Schroeder is a firm believer of a more independent German foreign policy. For the first time since World War II, Germany's leaders are advocating a course based on German national interests. The general secretary of the Social Democratic Party, Franz Muentefering, summarized this position clearly: "Independently of what the UN decides, there must be a German way, that we must decide for ourselves what is to be done. That decision for us means no involvement in any ... conflict or war in Iraq."
Reflective of rising anti-US sentiments in Germany, campaign polemic invoked harsh criticism of US policy on Iraq. The chancellor himself mocked the US president in election rallies, telling crowds that he would not "click his heels" and say "ja" automatically to US foreign-policy demands or commands. Ludwig Stiegler, the Social Democrat parliamentary leader during the election, accused Bush of acting like a Roman dictator, "as if he were Caesar Augustus and Germany were his province Germania". Stiegler also compared the US ambassador to Berlin to Pyotr Abrassimow, the unpopular Soviet ambassador to East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Schroeder's justice minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, compared the Bush administration's policy towards Iraq to that of Hitler's strategy before World War II. She was quoted by the German regional newspaper Schwabisches Tagblatt as stating: "Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler also used." Daeubler-Gmelin also remarked that the United States "has a lousy legal system" and that "Bush would be sitting in prison today" if new insider-trading laws had applied when the president had worked as an oil executive. Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, condemned the remarks as "way beyond the pale", and according to the White House, the president was "very angered" by the comments. Schroeder sent a letter of apology to Bush. Daeubler-Gmelin denied making the comments, but Schroeder announced that she would resign. Then defense minister Rudolf Scharping, a leading figure in the SPD, accused Bush of wishing to remove Saddam Hussein in order to placate "a powerful - perhaps overly powerful - Jewish lobby". Predictably, this raised vocal accusations of anti-Semitism in Washington.
Unfortunately for the United States, German opposition to US foreign policy tends to be validated by the march of events. Accordingly, there is little prospect that Berlin is willing to compromise over the Iraq question. Immediately after his re-election, Schroeder declared that "we have nothing to change in what we said before the election and we will change nothing", a view backed by Green Party secretary general Reinhard Buetikofer. Opposition to the Iraq war formed part of a wider German foreign-policy strategy - actively pursued by Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer - of opposing key elements of the Bush administration agenda and thinking. Like Schroeder, Fischer's roots lie in radical left-wing politics. A self-professed Marxist activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a record of violent street protest, Fischer leads a party that stands on the extreme left of the political spectrum and that is shunned as a respectable political force even in much of Europe until recent successes at the polls. The Green Party is fundamentally opposed to the US missile defense system and highly critical of US unilateralism on the Kyoto Protocol. With just 11 seats in the 601-seat German parliament, the Green Party holds the balance of power and with it a great deal of influence in the governing Red-Green coalition.
Fischer was also outspoken in his criticism of Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, which called for action to be taken against the emerging threat posed by rogue states that were relabeled an "axis of evil". Fischer warned the White House that the fight against terrorism was not "a blank check in and of itself to invade some country - especially not single-handedly". In an interview with Die Welt, he criticized what he perceived to be US unilateralism over a possible war with Iraq: "Without compelling evidence, it will not be a good idea to launch something that will mean going it alone. The international coalition against terror does not provide a basis for doing just anything against anybody - and certainly not by going it alone. This is the view of every European foreign minister. For this reason, talk of the 'axis of evil' does not get us any further. Lumping Iran, North Korea and Iraq all together, what is the point of this? ... For all the differences in size and weight, alliance partnerships between free democracies cannot be reduced to obedience; alliance partners are not satellites."
Fischer is fiercely critical of America's policy of using military power to deal with the threat of global terrorism. The solution, according to his view, lies in the reduction of global inequalities between rich and poor: "Chaos, poverty and social instability form the breeding ground on which fundamentalism, hatred and terror thrive. To tackle the new challenges, we need more than police and military missions. We need a long-term political and economic strategy which deals especially with the forgotten conflicts, the failed states, the black holes of lawlessness on our planet."
Fischer has opposed most of the foreign-policy initiatives under the Bush administration, with the notable exception of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In defiance of Bush's "axis of evil" speech, Fischer openly courted close ties with Iran and North Korea, and has been a keen supporter of the EU's policy of "constructive engagement" with what the US identifies as rogue regimes. At the same time, he is a staunch defender of the International Criminal Court and has fiercely opposed the concept of individual EU member states signing bilateral immunity agreements with the US. Environmental concerns have also been elevated by Fischer to the top of the Schroeder government's international agenda, and the foreign minister declared that Bush was making a "fatal error" by refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Germany is urging the US to remove its 150 or so land-based nuclear weapons still deployed on German soil. "The nuclear weapons still housed in Germany are a relic from the Cold War," said Green Party leader Claudia Roth in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "There is no need for them to be there. They should be removed and destroyed."
Engaging China
The EU is actively expanding beyond trans-Atlantic relations. The annual EU-China summits highlight not only the burgeoning economic ties between the major European powers and China but also moves toward closer political relations. Germany, backed by France, pushed for and achieved an in-principle agreement for the EU to work toward lifting the arms embargo imposed on China after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. The arms embargo has been an obstacle to stronger strategic ties. In the lead-up to the most recent summit last December, China branded the ban "political discrimination" and "the result of the Cold War". During his recent visit to China, Schroeder expressed the hope that the summit would "give an important signal" for the removal of the ban. Chirac also declared the French government in favor of rescinding the embargo during a visit to China last October.
Washington has strongly objected to any lifting of the arms embargo. Behind the US opposition lie broader concerns that a stronger China military, along with closer strategic relations between the EU and China, would undermine the present US hegemony in Northeast Asia. The Bush administration lobbied EU members to oppose the move by France and Germany to get the embargo lifted. The EU members that vocally resisted the change are those most closely aligned to the US, notably the government in British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Japan, a major US ally in East Asia, also urged the EU to retain the ban, with France and Germany asserting a more independent European stance toward China. While yielding to US pressure, the EU has declared that it "confirms its political will to continue to work towards lifting the embargo". For its part, Beijing "welcomed the positive signal, and considered it beneficial to the sound development of the comprehensive strategic partnership between China and the EU". The best the US can do is to slow EU-China convergence, but it cannot stop it.
Political and strategic considerations are closely tied to trade opportunities for European corporations in China. In 1980, China ranked 25th among the EU's trading partners. Today, it is the second-largest after the US and growing at a faster pace. Bilateral trade between the EU and China has doubled since 1999 to 142.3 billion euros ($180.1 billion), making the EU China's largest trade partner. A number of bilateral agreements were signed at the seventh EU-China summit at The Hague last December 8 to accelerate economic relations. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson summed up the mood in European capitals when he called on the EU to "place China firmly and centrally on our radar. We must review and lift our relations with China to a new and higher, more intense level ... Europeans have to sit up and take notice because in absolute and relative terms, China is a huge phenomenon to be reckoned with."
Germany's central role in pushing for an end to the arms embargo is related to the fact that German corporations have been major beneficiaries of developing EU-China ties. Germany is by far the largest EU exporter to China, accounting for 44% of the total. Bilateral trade between China and Germany reached $43.6 billion last year - a 31% annual increase - and is expected to double by 2010. Some 2,000 German companies, including major banks, operate in China. China is heavily reliant on imported machinery and technology, especially from Germany and Japan, the world's two largest exporters of machine tools. Nearly two-thirds of EU exports to China are in the category of "machinery and vehicles".
According to a research paper issued by Deutsche Bank, 80% of German investors in China are major corporations in the automotive, steel, mechanical and chemical industries. BASF and Bayer, for instance, are the largest chemical firms in China. Volkswagen controls about 30% of the Chinese car market, where sales surged to five million units this year. In 2003, Volkswagen produced more cars in China than in Germany and Chinese sales accounted for one-third of the company's global net profit. The company has unveiled plans to invest another $6.5 billion in China to increase its annual production there to 1.6 million vehicles by 2008. German investment in China since 1995 increased tenfold, from just 800 million euros to 7.9 billion euros, by 2003, making Germany China's seventh-largest foreign investor.
German hopes in China were clearly displayed during Schroeder's three-day visit there on the eve of the Hague summit in December. Accompanied by 44 business leaders from major corporations such as DaimlerChrysler, Siemens and Deutsche Bank, the German chancellor signed 22 agreements with the Chinese government. These included the sale of Airbus commercial jets worth $1.3 billion, as well as $480 million in railway locomotives and $280 million in power-generation equipment. Schroeder declared that China's fast-growing car industry - now dominated by German companies - could be the "engine" of China's economic growth. He laid the cornerstone for a new DaimlerChrysler plant in Beijing and attended the opening ceremony of the second joint-venture factory between Volkswagen and First Auto Works, China's largest vehicle producer, in Changchun, in northeastern China. He told Chinese officials that German corporations were very interested helping to "restructure" China's northeastern heavy industries. The northeastern provinces, or Manchuria, are a key focus of German attention. The region has been the center of China's state-owned heavy industry.
Anti-Americanism has prove to be a useful ideology for the definition of a new European identity. It was the attempt to defend European colonialism in the Third World, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, that had forced Europe to accept US dominance. A new definition of European identity will seek strength from anti-Americanism in the form of anti-neo-imperialism in Asia and the Middle East. European anti-Americanism is not just a friendly disagreement with its former senior ally, it is a widening chasm to buttress an independent Europe. Although in the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe, the US anti-communist policies during the Cold War can translate into pro-US sympathies today, a comparable post-Cold War bonus does not appear to apply in the new state of a unified Germany. The social democracies in Europe seem more in tune with the neo-communism in China than the neo-liberal supply-side market fundamentalism promoted by the United States.
Next: The revival of militarism in Japan
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
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