Cooling Off After Germany's Election
By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, September 26, 2002; Page A33
The German election campaign did not change the government in Berlin, but it may yet change the world. Gerhard Schroeder's flagrant flirtation with German unilateralism and anti-Americanism is reverberating as a major shock for his partners in Washington, Paris, London and elsewhere.
Ironically, the tactical setback in U.S.-German relations may be overcome more quickly than the strategic damage done to Germany's role in Europe. Schroeder jettisoned all appearances of European consultation and coordination -- that is, all appearances of pursuing a thoroughly European Germany rather than a "German way" for Europe -- in the tight electoral battle with his conservative opponents. Schroeder on the stump, invoking national destiny and Germany's right to decide, made President Bush sound like a pussyfooting diplomat.
Schroeder's aggressive distancing of himself from Bush's demands for "regime change" in Iraq can be marked down to electoral opportunism. The chancellor probably would have promised voters Saddam Hussein's head on a platter if that would have guaranteed him victory. Such political motivation can be understood by practical politicians in other nations.
But Sunday's election, which resulted in a tiny four-vote majority for the Social Democrat-Green coalition first elected in 1998, also exposed global political fault lines that have been forming since the end of the Cold War and German reunification.
A reunited Germany was bound to emerge as Europe's heavyweight, pushing for its own interests and increasingly chafing at having to host on its sovereign soil tens of thousands of American troops. The only question was when. The answer, we discovered in this campaign and balloting, is now.
U.S.-German relations are in need of modernization in a time of testing and redefinition of global alliances dating from the Cold War. Russia and India sound more supportive of many U.S. strategic goals and the war on terrorism than do many European nations today.
The immediate task for Washington is to work through the hurt and anger that Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld have justifiably voiced over Schroeder's campaign rhetoric and focus instead on a new strategic relationship with Germany. Plenty of good reasons to reduce, redeploy or even withdraw totally the American troops in Germany will present themselves in the near future. Pique over campaign slurs is not one of them.
The Clinton administration's hopes that NATO expansion would provide a common cause large enough to keep Washington and Berlin in strategic lockstep have predictably fallen short. The Bush administration's questioning of the importance and utility of traditional alliances in fighting the war on terrorism, and its emphasis on preemption and global domination in military affairs, have increased the policy gap between the two capitals in recent months.
Diplomats are paid to bridge gaps created by conflicting domestic political demands. A list of quick fixes for this scratchy period includes Germany's assuming leadership of the international force in Afghanistan and more security responsibility in the Balkans; a fence-mending visit here by Germany's most popular politician, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer; and logistical and diplomatic support from Berlin for U.S. action against Iraq, which Schroeder was careful not to rule out in his campaign.
Germany and the United States are major powers with enough common interests and sufficient clout in the world to accommodate growing divergences between them. It is less clear that France, Spain or even Britain can accommodate as successfully an abrupt and deep changing of Germany's priorities in international and regional cooperation without major dislocation. The European Union certainly cannot.
That is why Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and other Europeans need to inject new energy and vision into the European process and transatlantic relations to limit the consequences of the German campaign and election. They should not leave the repair work to Washington alone. They must deal with the currents and forces in the German electorate that made a trump card out of Schroeder's appeal to German nationalism and anti-militarism.
"Germany's movement out of the mainstream on this matter is bad news for Europe and for the Netherlands," the new Dutch foreign minister, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, told me in Washington yesterday.
European "public opinion will support U.S. action in Iraq if it comes under a Security Council resolution. The campaign in Germany obscured that. We need fences to be mended, and we need Europe to have a common opinion before it will be heard."
Analyst Robert Kagan has written insightfully that Europeans and Americans have developed differing views of power that now make them ineffective allies. Germany's election campaign helps out Kagan's argument, which seems to me already to project Germany's ambivalent attitudes on military power onto Europe as a whole. The present governments of the Netherlands, Italy and Spain are more supportive of U.S. action than were their predecessors, and France still covets and uses power in ways that establish that, although realpolitik is a German word, it is a French vocation.
There is still time for Europe (including Germany) to show in Iraq and elsewhere that "the German way" traced in the campaign is neither irreversible nor universal on the continent. America still needs a few good allies, and a few good allies still need a stabilizing U.S. global reach.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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