LONDON–We would like to know what kind of stuff these German Greens are made of. The Kosovo to bomb or not to bomb decision arrived on their platter as soon as the election results were counted. Richard Holbrooke may now have got them off the hook as much as he did Slobodan Milosevic, but the issue on the use of the deployment of NATO force, and its ancillary decision, to use it without an explicit UN mandate, is very likely to return during their term of office.
Supposedly pacifist inclined by early conviction, definitely pro United Nations and wary of enforcement or peacekeeping actions done in its name without a Security Council vote, the Greens are bound to be difficult bedfellows for western governments, who have a tendency to bend the rules on military intervention. The Kosovo decision had all the makings of an early clash between principle and realpolitik. The likely next foreign minister of Germany, Green leader Joschka Fischer was being cajoled and pushed the last week to fall into line with majority opinion within NATO and give the green light for the go-ahead to bomb if Milosevic didn’t climb down.
Those who voted Green in the recent German elections, hoping for application of the principles under which the Greens campaigned, should read Nancy Mitford’s “Voltaire in Love”. She describes at length the vicissitudes of the man of letters’ friendship with King Frederick the Great of Prussia. While crown prince, Frederick, encouraged by Voltaire, wrote a tract denouncing Machiavelli, demonstrating that it is possible to conceive of a European balance of power without armies and recourse to war. But on inheriting the throne Frederick ditched his beliefs and informed his friend that since everyone else was doing it he was going to enjoy the opportunities and the spoils of war as much as the next king. While he held true to his old commitments to abolish censorship and torture, at the game of war he was as violent and as unscrupulous as Machiavelli’s prince.
The Greens are at a similar crossroads. Will they make love or war? Will they be in power or only in office? All the old cliches can be rolled out, yet they are nevertheless apposite. Do the Greens in reality have the chance to put into effect the principles they spent the best part of their lives fighting for or, now they see the kingdom spread beneath them, are they embarrassed about what they stood for, or simply afraid of the consequences if they gave them effect?
One can see the subtle influences at work. The nice words (he is “gifted”) said about Mr Fischer by departing Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The sympathetic but in the end doubtless tough chidings from Bill Clinton during his recent visit to Washington at the side of chancellor-elect Gerhard Shroder. We can probably assume that Clinton pointed to his days in Oxford when he too was a war protestor but how he had to quietly put that to one side if he wanted to accomplish anything in the real political world.
Lost on Clinton, apparently, is the irony that four of the most senior positions in the four most powerful western governments are occupied, or very soon will be, by ex anti-war protestors and, if they pulled together, rather than tacitly trying to subvert each other’s courage, they might be able to march against establishment opinion with some effect. Instead, acting as lone individuals, they go along to get along. They tell themselves that they have done this or done that, which their conventional predecessors never would.
We can see this so clearly with Clinton. I’d make a guess that Clinton tells himself, “I’ll never press the button”. Or that he wallows in the fact–which was leaked to the press–that he stayed up to the small hours of the morning to make sure that the cruise missiles targetted on a Sudanese factory were only fired when he was personally convinced that every worker was back at home, safely tucked up in bed. And he is obviously proud too, of how on his African trip earlier this year, he asked forgiveness from the people of Rwanda for failing them in their hour of need, when the U.S. stymied efforts by UN peacekeepers to come to the rescue as they confronted the genocidal killings of the Hutu. Who else in high office in twentieth century politics would have been so concerned or so apologetic, he probably tells himself.
All this is predicated on the belief that the establishment and powerful ideological lobbies would not tolerate much more. Clinton is at least half convinced that there is a right wing plot to topple him. He has always been careful not to alienate the Pentagon brass, particularly after his early failed effort to allow gays in the military to come out of the closet. He would not even get behind the campaign to ban land-mines, despite a public opinion softened by the death of Princess Diana. Nor would he push for what he had said he wanted, an International Criminal Court, even though America’s closest allies in NATO all voted for it.
This week it was almost the turn of the German Greens to take the high ground–or the low ground–on a decision of momentous proportions, whether to bomb the heartland of a fellow European country. Fortunately for them the threat of force was, it appears, enough to persuade Milosevic to compromise. (NATO was lucky that its bluff was mightier than its sword–all the evidence of the twentieth century suggests that aeriel bombing works to consolidate the power of whoever rules beneath.) So Mr Fischer is off the hook of his mighty dilemma this time. And next?
