Joschka Fischer on the rise of China and "the descent of the West"

"The global Western era is coming to an end in our time." - Joschka Fischer, Der Abstieg des Westens: Europa in der neuen Weltornung des 21.Jahrhunders (2018)

Joschka Fischer's latest book is a broad sketch of the state of world politics. Obviously a very large subject! And the satellite's eye view inevitably involved in such an undertaking can induce dizziness at times. But as a former Foreign Minister of Germany and as someone who have been intensely engaged in politics since his youth, Fischer does a respectable job of it, with particular emphasis on the challenges the changes present for European foreign policy.

Fischer sees the rise of China toward being the world's leading power in the world as being the geopolitical consideration already defining the world in the 21st century. He looks at this development through a foreign-policy "realist" lens, viewing China's rise not as a threatening menace to be suppressed or some ideal to be supported but rather as a normal development in the relative power of nations in the world. He sees us as now being in a "global transition phase to a new, Asia-centric world order." (The quotes from the book in this post are my translations from the German original.)

Many Americans are inclined to see US predominance in the world as some kind of inevitable historical development, even divine providence. But that predominance didn't show itself on the world scene until the end of the First World War, and even then proceeded in fits and starts until the end of the Second World War. The "Westphalian" system of nation-states as we know it began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1848. Just two centuries ago, the dominant powers in the world were the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, Prussia, and the Ottoman Empire. All of those had ceased to exist by 1918.

Very mindful of the risks that the relative decline of the US in world power and China's rise to the leading role, his hope is that the process will involve more active, pragmatic cooperation than military hostility. He calls this option "Chimerica." Neither German nor English readers are likely to miss the suggestive ambiguity of that term because of its resemblance to "chimera/Chimäre." Unlike much of the current political conversation in the US, Fischer views Russia realistically as at most a secondary player for the foreseeable future. He sees three major options for Russia, due to its weak economy, retarted innovation, and heavy dependence on fossil fuel production: stay weak and isolated; become a junior partner to China; or, develop a cooperative relationship with Europe.

Fischer has a Malthusian streak that sees world population growth almost as a self-evident evil, to which he apparently sees no real solution in sight. In fact, urbanization and the growing demand by women worldwide for equal rights create a strong tendency toward the stabilization of the world population in the 21st century.

He also seems to have a bit of a techno-utopian perspective, although his general comments on the role of progress in "digitalization" seem pretty sensible.

I'm tempted to say that his observations about the need for greater EU political unity are fairly pedestrian. But they are downright radical-democratic in comparison to the notions of the far-right nationalists and their supporters. And he actually does advocate for an aggressive political strategy by EU advocates to win a solid popular majority in Europe for more substantive political integration: "it seems to me the moment has come to leave behind the bare integration-pragmatism and widen it to a political strategy to win back a wider political integration."

Which is very appealing. But it's how to see how any option, including the two-speed one he advoates, can reasonably move forward without at least simultaneously creating a eurozone that can survive as an "optimal currency area" and reaching a general European strategv for a real (not theatrical only) solution to the longterm immigration situation which no amount of magic conjuring will make go away. Fischer explicitly acknowledges the difficulty and urgency of the latter. National solutions "no longer make sense," he states in saying what should be obvious but the xenophobic parties are trying hard to deny. The euro's problems, though, he mostly skirts around.

Fischer optimistically views China's rise to its current position as the ascendent leading power in the world as having been "exclusively peaceful," though that might be overgenerous, unless we start the time count after China's armed incursions into northern Vietnam in 1979, aka, the Sino-Vietnamese War, the Third Indochina War.

The US, by contrast, achieved its role as world hegemon through two world wars and the Cold War, which included hot wars of various levels of intensity, most notably the Korean War and the US' own Indochina War. But Fischer stresses that US "soft power" also "played a very decisive role in its rise and, above all, for its roll as 'benevolent hegemon' through the decades."

One of the things I appreciate about Fischer's political perspective on the United States is that he stresses the central importance democratic traditions of the US, "the basic values of the American Revolution, [of] democracy, human rights, and the rule of law." But he also notes that the American tradition of "territorial conquest" is not one that should be perpetuated or defended. To me, this is a sensible and obvious perspective, one that has important differences from the Hamilitonian-Whig ideological version of US history that is currently dominant, remarkably not only on the left but if anything particulary on the left.

Fischer even credits the "idealistic committment" that has accompanied the hard-headed pursuit of American national interest in foreign policy. Although foreign policy realists like Fischer are also accutely aware of how easily and frequently the idealistic rhetoric has been used to justify brutal and unjust policies. He had direct experience of that as German Foreign Minister during the Iraq War.

He also makes an important historical observation that the US even prior to its overseas imperialism at the turn of the 20th century was nevertheless oriented to an internationalist outlook. And he attribues that in particular to its culture of immigration, which in the 19th century was primarily European immigration:

[The US] was, in contrast to other nations, almost from the beginning on founded as interally "globalized," despite the breadth and thin settlement of the huge country, through the immigration-related combination of its population from all dominant countries and parts of the world - on a universalism of values, and that had consequences for its popular culture. What made and makes the immigrant population "Americans" were the Constiituion and the value of the USA, all of them immaterial, normative values, and in their innner core an unparalleled freedom for the individual.

Fischer's general perpective in this book is describing the longer-term shift in world politics from the US as the so-called unipolar hegemon in the early 1990s to the current period, in which he sees China's process of rising to be the world's dominant power as defining world politics. And with that point, he is stressing how radically the Trump white nationalist view misunderstands so very much of what America's influence in the world has been.

I'm totally sympathetic to Fischer's perspective on that. But in terms of historical perspective, there are some obvious problems left unstated by Fischer's prsentation, which is not primarily focused on illustrating the major conflicts of 19th century US history. The United States was also defined, of course, by the exclusion of the indigenous Indian population and by a very particular treatment of immigrants of African origin. There were good reasons slavery was known as the Peculiar Institution. The Calhounian (not Jacksonian) political tradition from which Donald Trump and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III draw today is unfortunately also very much a part of the history of the American brand of internationalism.

Fischer understands Trump's America First blustering not as isolationism but as narrow nationalist belligerence. Presumably the book manuscript was finalized in late 2017. But even without the events of this year - US rejection of the Iran nuclear agreement, more intensely expressed hostility to NATO and the EU - Fischer sees Trump as already having made a decisive break with the previous level of commitment to NATO common defense, one that increases the urgency of better European cooperation on military matters and European security. Though he does not understand the latter to be Europe pursuing new and expanded military roles in the Middle East.

He describes the major US soft-power assets this way:

... the attractiveness of the US way of life, the popular culture of Hollywood, pop music, and jazz all the way to Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Starbucks. As well as a policy of open borders, which brought the best and most clever into the country and many more besides. The gigantic land simply needs people. Through immigration developed not only growth, but also a strong dynamic of upward mobility. And obviously there was also the language, an easy-to-learn and globally spoken English, which through the worldwide media dominance of the USA via TV and the Internet became the lingua franca of modern times.

(People who didn't grow up as native German speakers might have a somewhat different perspective on how easy English is to learn!)

Fischer doesn't see a comparable soft power potential for China on the historical horizon.

He closes the book with a chapter on the rise of 1930s style authoritarianism in the West today and another on the history of German nationalism and its immensely destructive and self-destructive consequences.

Fischer seems especially comfortable writing on political theory, as in the chapter on contemporary authoritarianism:

The ideological cadavers of National Socialism and fascism - and the previous "conservative revolution" of the 1920s - are being exhumed again and used by rightist intellectuals as the newest theoretical faschion [Dernier cri] of Western democracy and its fundamental values. An anti-democrat and intellectual henchman of the Nazis like Carl Schmitt counts these days as the pillar-saint of this New Right.

This Carl Schmitt.

Merkel tries to negotiate the new US/Europe environment

The Trump Family Business Administration has a number of traits that can add up to risky and poorly-considered foreign policy moves: extreme arrogance, contempt for understanding relevant data, a glorification of war, the desire to effect drastic changes quickly in major foreign policy and military alignments.

We have the complicated and obscure dealings with Russia. Trump has expressed his support for a Saudi-lead, anti-Shi'a/anti-Iran push in the Middle East. The immediate consequence was Saudi Arabia began a siege of neighboring Qatar - that is not yet a blockage - that includes the unusual aspect of seriously interfering with deliveries of food and medicine. (Gary Sick, The Siege of Doha LobeLog Foreign Policy 06/16/2017) These moves, and a further escalation of tensions with Iran, could have huge consequences.

So it's stunning that the Senate passed new sanctions against Russia and Iran with little public discussion and no votes against them by Democrats.

One of the most consequential shifts in US foreign policy under Trump has been his Administration's distancing of the US from European allies and its obvious hostility to the EU as an institution.

This kind of unilateralism is not new. Before the Iraq War turned into a disaster too serious for all but the clinically delusional to ignore, the Cheney-Bush Administration was gleefully demanding European submission to US demands on "out of area" military matters. Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro examined that US ploy in Allies At War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq (2004) with particular emphasis on possible diplomatic paths to mending the damaged relationships.

They may have been eager to apply a both-sides-do-it perspective in some cases. But this observation is a good reminder of the contempt Cheney's Administration showed for the European allies:

The combustible interaction of politicians on both sides also deeply exacerbated the transatlantic split. On the American side, the self-assured, moralistic, and often condescending attitude of much of the Bush administration - particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney, but often the President himself - made many Europeans even more determined to resist American leadership. From the start, Americans, including the President, gave the impression that they considered the Iraq decision - and indeed all decisions about global peace and security - solely for them to make, and that Europeans had little choice but to follow their lead or get out of the way. This was an attitude almost designed to provoke opposition from those in Europe who were reluctant to accept unquestioningly the virtues of American leadership or the merits of a unipolar world. [my emphasis]

Former Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer writes about Angela Merkel's German perspective on countering the Trump unilateralism in Angela Merkel’s Challenge to Europe Project Syndicate 06/05/2017:

Anyone who has been paying attention has known for some time that the historic changes taking place today did not originate in Germany. Rather, they are emanating from the geopolitical West’s two founding members: the United States and the United Kingdom. Prior to Trump’s election and the UK’s Brexit referendum, Germans saw no reason to make fundamental changes to the existing geopolitical order.

But those two events have shaken the foundation upon which Europe’s peace and prosperity have rested since World War II. Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union could inspire other countries to follow suit. And Trump’s isolationist, “America first” agenda implies that the US will abdicate its leadership role in the world, and possibly abandon its security guarantee for Europe.

Europeans avoided a disaster of historic proportions in last month’s French presidential election. If Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front had been elected, she would likely have brought an end to the euro, the EU, and the common market. Continental Europe would now be mired in a deep economic and political crisis. [my emphasis]

What Fischer doesn't say here is that without abandoning the austerity economics she has successfully imposed on the EU, including writing it into national constitutions of the members with things like the Fiscal (Suicide) Compact, it will be extremely difficult to rectify that "deep economic and political crisis." The nationalist polarization against EU members like Greece, Irealand, Portugal and Spain and, soon enough, Italy, runs directly contrary to the kind of xenophobia that has given a surge in electoral popularity to Trump-Putin type parties in the EU like Le Pen's National Front in France.

Fischer, who was Foreign Minister during the NATO crisis over Iraq, argues that Merkel isn't trying to further undermine the NATO alliance:

A careful analysis of Merkel’s words shows that she was not questioning the future of the transatlantic alliance. Rather, she was calling for a stronger Europe. Merkel knows that if the US sacrifices its place at the top of the international order for domestic political reasons, it will not be replaced by a new leading power, nor will a new world order emerge. What we will have is a power vacuum, marked by chaos. And as the world becomes less stable, we Europeans will have no choice but to come together to defend our interests. No one else will do it for us.

So, Merkel’s speech was first and foremost about strengthening Europe. And, fortunately, she has found a partner in French President Emmanuel Macron. Both leaders want to stabilize the eurozone, restore economic growth, and strengthen Europe’s security with a joint border force and a new refugee policy.

Of course, anti-Europe politicians and pundits in the United States can always argue that any defiance of orders from Washington by Merkel or other NATO members is to blame for undermining the alliance. Because that's basically what the usual suspects argued during the NATO crisis over the US preventive war against Iraq.

Russia, Ukraine and parsing politicians' positions on foreign affairs

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence (How to think about Russia 03/10/2017) links to a nearly three-year-old article by Karl-Heinz Kamp at the Carnegie Europe center, Bad Idea, Vladimir! 04/04/2014, that looks at the standoff between Russia and NATO over Ukraine and Russia's annexation of the Crimea that year. He argues that from the Russian viewpoint, re-annexing the Crimea (which was part of Russia from 1783 until 1954), may have taken on more of a burden than a blessing:

In the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal to reestablish at least parts of Russia’s bygone empire, the annexation of Crimea looks like a smart move. Yet so far, the cost-benefit analysis of this illegal step seems to leave Russia in the red.

Before the Anschluss, Moscow controlled the whole of Ukraine through the compliant regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych. In the future, Russia will be able to sway only parts of a country that is on a slippery slope toward disintegration. Unwittingly, Putin added another source of instability to his already shaky Russian empire.

The downsides, of course, have a lot to do with the reaction of NATO countries. Kamp describes the lines of confrontation:

However, what looks like a negative cost-benefit analysis for Russia raises concerns in many NATO member states. Since Putin appears too smart to strike a bad deal, it is fair to assume that Moscow assesses costs and benefits differently from the West. If that is the case, Russia might be ready to take even bigger risks than just occupying Crimea to score points at home. The long-standing axiom that Russia would never dare commit an act of aggression against a NATO member because the repercussions would be too dangerous for Moscow could prove hollow.

Baltic governments anxiously ponder the scenario of Russia stirring up unrest among ethnic Russians in their countries to have a pretense to “protect” its citizens abroad. For instance, how would NATO react if Russian forces occupied a 30-mile-wide strip of Estonian border territory as a “safe haven” for ethnic Russians and provided them with Russian passports? Would it send in the NATO Response Force and start a major war over 30 miles of land? Doing nothing would mean the end of NATO as a functioning alliance. [my emphasis]

This is a real dilemma, even if our neocons and "humanitarian hawks" see it as an opportunity, adding the Baltic states to the NATO alliance in 2004 was a reckless move. Or at minimum, not well considered.

Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were also added to the alliance in 2004. Albania and Croatia followed in 2009. But unlike former Warsaw Pact members Albania, Bulgaria and Romania, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were directly incorporated into the old Soviet Union. It's not hard to understand that, whatever the moral or legal claims may be, the closer NATO's borders get to the border of Russia, the more concerned any Russian policymaker would be about it.

The post-World War II Western decisions about policy toward Russia are still debated today in the historical sub-field of Cold War Studies. The post-1989 Western policies toward Russia will no doubt be debated for a long time, as well. But in 2017, we are where we are.

Kamp links to a Reuters report from 2014 that discusses the position of three former German Chancellors on Russia and the Ukraine/Crimea crisis (Erik Kirschbaum, Putin's apologist? Germany's Schroeder says they're just friends 03/27/2014):

[Gerhard] Schroeder is hardly alone with his criticism of the West. Two other former chancellors, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, have also questioned the treatment of Putin and Russia.

Schmidt, a Social Democrat like Schroeder, has called sanctions against Russia "dumb", saying in the latest edition of Die Zeit: "It would be better, in the interest of peace, to sit down and talk instead of threatening sanctions."

Kohl, a Christian Democrat (CDU) like Merkel, told Bild newspaper in mid-March: "The upheaval in Ukraine was not handled intelligently. There's also been a lack of sensitivity with our Russian neighbours, especially with President Putin."

Schröder does have an obvious financial interest in defending Russian foreign policy positions. But that doesn't necessarily mean his advice is bad on the topic. Especially since two other former Chancellors were expressing similar concerns in 2014. It's worth noting that Schröder's Foreign Minister, former Green leader Joschka Fischer, also worked for Russian energy interests after he left office. But he was far more critical of the Russians' actions in Ukraine in 2014. In fact, he leans toward the hawkish side on NATO affairs in general. (See: Ralf Neukirch,
The Eternal Rivalry of Joschka Fischer and Gerhard Schröder Spiegel International 02/15/2010)

The following also notable, in light of current news in the US. A green Member of Parliament is quoting as calling the former Chancellor as basically a Russian stooge:

"Schroeder is spreading the Kremlin's propaganda and everyone should understand that he's now a paid spokesman for Russia," said Manuel Sarrazin, who sits on the European affairs committee of the German parliament for the opposition Greens.

"He's in the service of Russia with a big conflict of interest," Sarrazin told Reuters.

Kirschbaum's report also refers to a TV report, "An ARD TV investigation, called 'The dubious activities of the ex-chancellor on Putin's behalf', said Schroeder took part in a secret meeting at the Russian embassy in Berlin on March 4, three days after Putin announced his right to invade Ukraine."

It's worth mentioning here that Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign in 1974 after it was discovered that one of his closest staff, Günter Guillaume, was exposed as an East German spy. But he really was a spy. It wasn't a matter of him having some undisclosed meeting with an East German diplomat during a political campaign.

My point here is that we need to take conflicts of interest into account in the position officials or major public figures take on foreign policy. For instance, our ExxonMobil Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was previously the CEO of a company that once had a deal for $500 billion worth of business with Russia, a deal that was put on indefinite hold by the Obama Administration's sanctions on Russia over Crimea. It would be foolish to disregard that aspect of his experience.

But having political positions that match up to those of a foreign government or political group isn't a sign of corruption or treason. Though either could lead to that result. Foreign policy is largely about deciding which countries to favor and which to oppose. And on which issues.

And Germany has its own particular national interests with Russia: "Berlin's economic links with Moscow are much stronger than those of other big Western powers. Germany is the biggest buyer of Russian natural gas exports, and its government has tended to tread more carefully than the United States, Britain or France."

Joschka Fischer on Angela Merkel and the 2017 election

This is really sad. It's Joschka Fischer pumping up Angela Merkel as the savior of The West: "Den Westen" könnte es bald nicht mehr geben Süddeutsche Zeitung 29.09.2016. Fischer is the formerly radical Green Party leader who served as Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister in the red-green national government in Germany in 1998–2005.

I appreciate Fischer's "realist" view on foreign policy. But his position in this article is a lazy centrism over the problems of the EU. He argues that both the right (the AfD/Alternative for Germany) and the Left Party are pursuing a nationalist course and both want to kiss up to Russia.

So Angela Merkel is the last, best hope for saving "the West," i.e., the European Union.

Say what?!

Yes, that's really what he says:

Man kann nur hoffen, dass diese Kelche allesamt an uns vorübergehen. Und man sieht auch, was vom Verbleiben Angela Merkels im Amt der Bundeskanzlerin über 2017 hinaus abhängt - für Deutschland, für Europa und den Westen.

[One can only hope the this cup will pass from all of us. And one also sees how much is dependent on Angela Merkel staying in office as Federal Chancellor after 2017 - for Germany, for Europe and the West.]

How far will Merkel and the EU go in pressuring Greece?

Politico's European edition had a report last week in which EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who was backed by Angela Merkel in the most recent European elections, sounds like he's trying to distance himself from the recent flood of leaks from officials sources threatening Greece with explusion from the eurozone currency union (Florian Eder and Carrie Budooff, Juncker: ‘There will be no default’ 04/20/2015):

An agreement on a financial rescue package remains distant, Juncker said, but he ruled out a Greek debt default or exit from the eurozone. In an interview with POLITICO, Juncker said his main reason for optimism rests less on any tangible progress than on the simple fact that the alternative is unimaginable.

Speaking from his office in the Berlaymont building, Juncker pushed back on an increasingly commonplace view among eurozone leaders that a Greek default could be a lever to force the Syriza-led government to get serious about its finances, and that its fallout could be contained. He declined to elaborate on the nightmare scenarios he sees potentially unfolding but warned that the failure to keep Greece afloat would “lead us to consequences that people don’t know the amplitude about.”

“We are prepared for all kinds of events but I am excluding at 100 percent this Grexit, or Greek exit,” Juncker said. “There will be no default.”

This remains the Greek government's strategic advantage in the current negotiations. As badly as Merkel may want to pound Greece into continuing the ruinous austerity policies that have the country stuck in a depression with no near-term prospects of emerging from it, a disintegration of the eurozone would cost German banks and would be enormously disruptive for the German economy. It would also remove the level of power Merkel currently enjoys as the Queen of Europe.

It seems to me she will be highly unlikely to go there. If that's the case, the biggest risk is that she will hold out too long before making a deal and a process of disintegration will start that the eurozone will be unable to control.

While dragging out the negotiations puts continuing pressure on Greece, it also gives Merkel some time to minimize the political shock in her own CDU party and among German voters more generally when and if she capitulates on the Greek austerity program. She and her party have recklessly promoted the idea that Greeks were lazy, irresponsible deadbeats and that's the only real problem. Walking that back will require effort and finesse. Both of which she has repeatedly shown herself capable of displaying.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer argued back in February that "Merkel seems to be well aware of the unmanageable risks of a Greek exit from the euro – although it remains to be seen whether she can muster the determination to revise the failed austerity policy imposed on Greece." (Angela Merkel’s Moment of Truth Project Syndicate 02/25/2015) He argues just before that something that does not seem obvious from what I've seen: "Merkel – despite her public image in southern Europe – was not aligned with the hawks in her party and administration" on the Greek crisis, implying that she favored milder policies. I'm not sure how he takes that perspective. But his view is worth noticing. He also writes:

The Greek conflict shows that Europe's monetary union is not working because one country's democratically legitimized sovereignty has run up against other countries' democratically legitimized sovereignty. Nation-states and a monetary union do not sit well together. But it is not hard to understand that, should “Grexit" occur, the only geopolitical winner would be Russia, whereas in Europe, everyone stands to lose.

Though the geopolitical risks have, so far, barely figured in the German debate, they greatly outweigh any domestic policy risks of finally coming clean with the German public. Greece, Germans should be told, will remain a eurozone member, and preserving the euro will require further steps toward integration, up to and including transfers and debt mutualization, provided that the appropriate institutions for this are established.

Such a step will require courage, but the alternatives – continuation of the eurozone crisis or a return to a system of nation-states – are far less attractive. (Germany has a new national-conservative party [the Alternative für Deutschland; AfD] whose leaders' declared aim is to pursue a pre-1914 foreign policy.) In view of the dramatic global changes and the direct military threat to Europe posed by Putin's Russia, these alternatives are no alternative at all, and the Greek “problem" looks insignificant. [my emphasis]

Joschka Fischer on Merkel's foreign policy

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer seems to be having uncharacteristic difficulty deciding how to understand Angela Merkel's foreign policy. In German Foreign Policy Comes of Age Project Syndicate 12/05/2014

The fragility of Germany’s foreign-policy foundations was to become clear during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Though the main democratic parties agreed after 1990 that continuity and predictability in German foreign policy were essential, it was Germany that opposed a European response to the crisis and insisted on national solutions that would be coordinated by the EU.

As Europe’s strongest economy, Germany suddenly was forced to lead. But it knew no better than to impose the lessons of its own experience – particularly a concern for price stability that harks back to interwar hyperinflation – on the rest of Europe. Germany’s government still confuses the successful recipes of the Federal Republic with the very different needs of a continental economy’s leading power. As a result, the EU has been in a permanent crisis, characterized by economic stagnation and high unemployment. [my emphasis]

The bolded part is an accurate and severe judgment on Merkel's foreign policy.

But that's not exactly consistent with his statement in the same column, "Germany today poses no threat to its neighbors or the European order." I assume he means military threat. But the damage Merkel's Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies are doing is staggering.

Fischer here seems to be endorsing a hardline anti-Russian policy and seems to think that Merkel is pursuing one. And while she's definitely taken an anti-Russian position over Ukraine, I'm not convinced she's as committed to a New Cold War as American neocons or the current Ukrainian government might hope. Her economic policies have left the eurozone economy highly vulnerable to losses from economic sanctions.

Fischer, I'm dismayed to see, seems to be eager for a confrontational policy with Russia. He even says, "Suddenly, the security of Germany’s own territory is at stake again." Oh, please. Russia isn't trying to take over Germany. It's drawn the line at letting Georgia and Ukraine being fully integrated into the EU or NATO. But not only is Russia not looking to take over Germany, Germany is also part of the NATO military alliance.

But then the recent drop in oil prices has hit the Russian economy much harder than Western sanctions.

Paul Krugman writes, "Obviously Russia’s problems stem from other things besides the oil price, namely Ukraine and the fallout thereof. Still, it’s pretty striking just how fast the financial situation seems to be unraveling. The bond vigilantes aren’t invisible in Moscow — 10-year interest rates, which were below 8 percent early this year, hit 12.67 percent today." (Is Russia 2015 Venezuela 1983? 12/08/2014)

Robert Parry writes about a shift in Der Spiegel's tone on Russia in Der Spiegel Tones Down Anti-Putin Hysteria Consortium News 11/28/2014.

Joschka Fischer on nationalism and the crisis of the EU

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer discusses the recent European Parliament election in Europe's Nationalists on the March Project Syndicate 05/31/2014. (German version: Die nationalistische Herausforderung Europas)

Here is how he diagnoses the problem of the EU:

At the heart of Europe’s political crisis is the eurozone’s economic and financial malaise, which neither national governments nor EU institutions seem able to address. Rather than strengthening pan-European solidarity, economic distress has led to a massive distribution conflict. What once was a relationship among equals has given way to a face-off between debtors and creditors.

The mutual distrust that characterizes this conflict may irreparably harm the soul of the Union and the entire European project. Northern Europe is plagued by fears of expropriation; the south is in the grip of a seemingly unending economic crisis and unprecedentedly high unemployment, for which its citizens hold the north – particularly Germany – responsible. The debt crisis in the south, together with the social consequences of harsh austerity measures, is seen simply as the abandonment of the solidarity principle by the rich north.

This may be attractive as a diplomatic posture: let's all sit down and reason together, can't we all just get along, etc.

Its would be more descriptive to say that the onset of the depression in the eurozone in 2008 triggered a series of events - decline of GDP, rise of unemployment, flight of capital from "periphery" countries to the northern countries - which placed a number of undercapitalized banks that had been pursuing risky lending policies in immediate danger of bankruptcy. The various eurozone governments were then faced with either saving or reorganizing the endangered banks. There was no banking union, meaning there were no eurozone-wide mechanisms for supervising the banks and for using the common resources of eurozone countries to deal with financial crises of banks.

Countries like Ireland and Spain decided to use public funds and higher public debt to bail out their countries' private banks. Except for Greece, whose pre-crisis conservative governments had recklessly run up the public debt while cooking the books to disguise what they were doing, none of the other eurozone countries had any seriously problematic levels of debts prior to the onset of the crisis.

The debt crisis surfaced first in Greece, which had reached a level of debt that was unsustainable. A debt reduction (haircut) was needed with a restructuring of the existing debt. Angela Merkel's government in Germany, however, didn't want to let Greece take a debt haircut, because it would have immediately put pressure on undercapitalized German banks that had invested heavily in Greek debt. As the economic crisis rolled on, financial speculators put pressure on various countries in the eurozone that drove up their borrowing costs to levels that would have pushed them into national bankruptcy.

As Jamie Galbraith wrote in 2011, "The eurozone crisis is a bank crisis posing as a series of national debt crises and complicated by reactionary economic ideas, a defective financial architecture and a toxic political environment, especially in Germany, in France, in Italy and in Greece." (The crisis in the eurozone Salon 11/10/2011)

The "bailouts" that were provided by the Troika (IFM, EU Commission, ECB) to Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and the somewhat less onerous deals reached with other countries required those countries to take on more public debt to avoid defaulting on their old debt. Combined with shrinking GDP, this increased their debt as a percentage of GDP. And the neoliberal austerity policies that the Troika imposed on crisis countries and the EU's 2012 Fiscal (Suicide) Compact locked the entire eurozone into pro-cyclical economic policies. I'm not kidding when I call it Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics. The result in Greece's case is that, even with a subsequent relatively small haircut, debt as a percentage of GDP is considerably higher for Greece today than in 2009 when its debt crisis broke into public awareness.

Cerstin Gammelin und Raimund Löw provide a very useful outline of the course of the euro crisis in »Jedem seine Scheiße«: Wie Angela Merkels nationaler Egoismus die EU aufs Spiel setzt Blätter 5/2014. Their account is a useful reminder of the dominant role that Merkel and Germany have played in the course of events, with a stubborn insistence on extracting particular German interests at the expense of the prosperity and social solidarity in the eurozone as a whole. ("Solidarity" is not an exotic or unusual concept in the political vocabulary of Europe.)

The Fiscal Suicide Compact (Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union) is a key moment in this process. This treaty imposes arbitrary limits on national deficits and national debts, with EU institutions dominated by Germany having greater authority to enforce those restrictions. The Fiscal Suicide Compact required the signatory countries to make the highly restrictive debt and deficit provisions part of their national constitutions. It basically outlaws Keynesian, countercyclical policies in a depression or recession. It bans basic macroeconomics from being used as a guide for economic policy during economic crises, in other words.

The Fiscal Suicide Pact was a major part of the price that Merkel extracted in mid-2012, in return for her agreeing to look the other way as the ECB used a creative way to evade its own legal restrictions against direct purchases of eurozone national debt as a way to support the backstop that debt and defend it from speculators.

So its surprising and disappointing to see Fischer defending Angie-nomics this way: "to hold the German hegemon responsible for austerity policies in the south is only partly justified; the German government did not force the affected countries to run up high levels of public debt." Actually, the German government did force the periphery eurozone countries "to run up high levels of public debt." It's really hard to see how Fischer could make such a claim, even as an effort to make the message sound more palatable to the German public.

He continues directly to say, "What Germany can be held responsible for is its leaders' insistence on simultaneous debt reduction and structural reforms and their objection to almost any growth-oriented policies within the eurozone." It would be more accurate to say that Germany should be held responsible for Merkel's (and the SPD's!) bad debt reduction approach. And to say that Merkel's policies which she did indeed force on the periphery nations was focused not on growth but on internal devaluation by reducing most people real income int he periphery countries.

Fischer seems to equate the German nationalism of Merkel's short-sighted policies, which focus on extracting benefits for Germany our of the currency zone at the expense of the other countries, with the resistance to those policies in the countries most damaged by them.

Fischer's column places the focus on the danger of rightwing nationalism from parties like France's National Front.

But he seems to be stuck in the outdated dichotomy of pro-Europe parties vs. anti-Europe rightwing parties.

The reality today is that unless pro-Europe/anti-austerity policies prevail soon, a prospect whose likelihood seem low at the moment, the eurozone will probably not survive and possibly not the European Union, either.

Gammelin und Raimund Löw write:

Die Ironie der Geschichte: Auf paradoxe Weise hat sich das Merkelsche Leitmotiv „Scheitert der Euro, dann scheitert Europa“ seit Beginn der Krise in sein Gegenteil verkehrt: Der Euro steht heute dank unkonventioneller Maßnahmen der EZB und der Euroländer nicht mehr vor dem Aus, dafür aber fordert die Rettungspolitik ihre Opfer, vor allem im Süden des Währungsgebietes. Die Tendenz ist unübersehbar: Der Euro bleibt, aber Europa bröckelt. Unter Merkels Ägide hat die Krise Deutschland verschont, aber Europa hat sie in existenzielle Sorgen gestürzt.

[The irony of history: In a paradoxical way, the Merkelite leitmotive "If the euro fails, then Europe {the EU project} fails" has reversed into its opposite since the beginning of the crisis. Today the euro no longer stand at its end, thanks to the unconventional measures {especially since June 2012} of the ECB and the euro countries, but in exchange the rescue policies have claimed their victims, above all in the south of the currency zone. The trend cannot be overlooked: The euro remains, but Europe {the EU} is disintegrating. Under Merkel's auspices, the crisis has spared Germany, but Europe has plunged into existential worries.]

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, greece, joschka fischer

Joschka Fischer on the Balkans and the legacies of the First World War

Joschka Fischer takes a shot at defining the present-day legacy of the First World War in The Great War’s Long Shadow Project Syndicate 01/29/2014.

What he has to say about the Balkans is especially interesting:

After the Cold War’s end and the collapse of the Russian Empire’s Soviet successor, war returned to the Balkans under very similar conditions to those that prevailed in the period before 1914, with aggressive nationalism ultimately reconfiguring the disintegrating Yugoslavia as six separate states. Of course, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, whose call for a "Greater Serbia" triggered the war, was not alone: For a moment, Europe was in danger of reverting to the confrontation of 1914, with France and the United Kingdom supporting Serbia, and Germany and Austria favoring Croatia.

Fortunately, there was no relapse, because the West had learned its lessons from historical mistakes. Today, three factors loom large in the avoidance of disaster: the United States’ military presence in Europe, the progress of European integration, and Europe’s abandonment of great-power politics. Yet there is no point in fooling oneself: Only as long as the Balkan countries believe in the European Union and the benefits of membership will today’s precarious peace in the region become permanent.

The centenary articles on the start of the war will refer to the obvious role Serbian hostility toward the Habsburg's Austro-Hungarian Empire had in starting the war through the Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Austria Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

We'll see how much background we see in the popular press on the major influence of Balkan conflicts in the buildup to the war in the years before Franz Ferdinand showed up in Sarajevo.

Much less those like the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12 that wound up feeding into the complex alliances that made the Balkans such a death-trap for peace. (Christopher Clark, Die Geschichte, unsere exzentrische Lehrerin Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.01.2014) That war involved an attempt by Italy to seize what is now Libya as a colonies from the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled the area, known then as the provinces of Tripolitana and Cyrenaica. Italy wound up in control of contested provinces.

More directly affecting the conditions that burst into conflict in 1914 were the two Balkan Wars, that of 1912 and the second in 1913.

George Kennan wrote about those wars in the New York Review of Books, "The Balkan Crisis: 1913 and 1993" (07/15/1993 issue), which also appeared as an introduction to The Other Balkan War: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect (1993). He wrote of the 1912 war which pitted the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro against the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). Kennan wrote:

But never, surely, did any coalition of powers launch a war on the basis of flimsier understandings among them about what it was they were fighting for than did the participants of this military action against the Turks. The relations among the supposed allies, and particularly the most prominent of them — Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks — had, even before this, been of the worst kind, ridden by rivalries, suspicions, and conflicting aims. The result was predictable. The defeat of the Turks ended with forces of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece occupying portions of the helpless Macedonia. Each had aspirations with relation to the territory that could be satisfied only at the expense of the others. It was not surprising, therefore, that in June 1913 war broke out among them. It was this that was known as the second Balkan war.

Of the 1913 war, Kennan wrote:

This second fracas centered upon the fighting between the Serbs and the Bulgarians, longstanding rivals for preeminence in that southern part of the Balkans. Hostilities were furious but brief, lasting only over the midsummer of 1913. The Bulgarians, already overextended by their action against the Turks, were decisively defeated. A species of peace treaty (like many such arrangements, in essence a provisorium) was signed in Bucharest on August 10, 1913.

The news that war had broken out in the Balkans, reaching the major Western countries in the
early autumn of 1913, naturally came as a shock to the adherents of the European and American peace movements. The shock was modified, to be sure, by the fact that in Britain and America public opinion, and in particular the liberal opinion so prominently represented in the peace movements, had for years been strongly, sometimes fulsomely, sympathetic to the Balkan Slavs in their struggle for liberation from Turkey. Many well-meaning people in the West found it easy, in the light of this enthusiasm, to forget that the hostilities had been inaugurated in the first war by the Balkan Slavs themselves, in ways that constituted violations not only of international law but of existing contractual agreements of one sort or another.

In the case of the second war, the situation was different. The Turks (although they took advantage of the occasion to recover a small part of the territory they had lost) were no longer a principal party to the hostilities. Not only that, but reports were now coming in of the extreme savagery of the fighting that had marked the first war and of the many atrocities against war prisoners and innocent civilian populations that had accompanied it. It was becoming evident that by no means all of the atrocities had come from the Turkish side. Altogether, it was now being realized that the continuation of the Balkan hostilities constituted a serious challenge to the peace movements of the time. [my emphasis]

The fanatical nationalistic passions involved in these wars and sharpened by the wars and the atrocities they involved raised the temperature and imbalanced the judgment of the parties involved, not least those in decision-making position in the Habsburg Empire.

Manfred Rauchensteiner writes in Der Tod des Doppeladlers. Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg (1993):

Die ständigen Spannungen im Zusammenhang mit dem Balkan sensibilisierten aber nicht nur, sie stumpften auch ab. Es verging doch kaum ein Tag, da nicht über einen neuerlichen Zwischenfall geschrieben und gesprochen wurde, an dem es keinen Notenwchsel gab oder das Interesse gewissermaßen gebündelt wurde. Und gerade in Österreich-Ungarn sah man so gut wie ausschhließlich auf den Balkan. Das erklärt auch zum Teil, weshalb dann in der Julikrise 1914 für die Danaumonarchie die europäische Kräftekonstellation keine Rolle zu spielen schien. Es war halt wieder einmal der Balkan, der zu schaffen machte und bei dem man nun endgültig eine eine Lösung nach Art des Gordischen Knotens suchte. (p. 26)

[The continuing tensions in connection with the Balkans not only sensitized [people in Austria-Hungary], they also made them callous. Hardly a day went by that there wasn't some brand new incident written and spoken about, on which there was no exchange of [diplomatic] notes, or in which [Austro-Hungarian] interests weren't somehow bundled up. And precisely in Austria-Hungary people looked so good as exclusively toward the Balkans. That also partially explains why, in the July Crisis of 1914, for the Danube Monarchy [Austria-Hungary] the European constellation of power seemed to play no role. It was just the Balkans once again that had pulled something off and toward which one needed to finally seek a solution of the Gordian Knot type [solving the seemingly unsolvable].

Tags: erster weltkrieg, first world war, joschka fischer

Another measure of the German SPD's corporate fawning

I'll always respect the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who served in office 1998-2005, for his determined stand against the Cheney-Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq. It was a major violation of the international laws against preventive wars. Schröder and his Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer were on the right side of that issue, and the Cheney Administration and its supporters could not have been more wrong.

The Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, who is often referred to as Germany's most respected public intellectual, wrote in 2004 ("Wege aus der Weltunordnung" Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 1/2004), referring to the development of the laws against preventive war:

Man muss sich diesen enormen Schub der Rechtsevolution vergegenwärtigen, um den radikalen Bruch zu erkennen, den die Bush-Regierung herbeigeführt hat – sowohl mit einer Sicherheitsdoktrin, die die geltenden rechtlichen Voraussetzungen für den Einsatz militärischer Gewalt vorsätzlich ignoriert, wie auch mit dem Ultimatum an den Sicherheitsrat, die aggressive Irakpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten entweder abzusegnen oder selbst in Bedeutungslosigkeit zu versinken.

[One must bring to mind the evolutionary thrust of the law to recognize the radical break that the Bush government precipitated - and even with a security doctrine that intentionally ignores the binding legal requirements for application of military force, as well as the ultimatum to the Security Council to either approve the aggressive Iraq policy of the United States or to sink itself into irrelevance.]

Just after the SPD/Green alliance won a second term in the 2002 Bundestag election, present-day Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel went to Washington to make nice with the Cheney Administration. It was quite a contrast. But her friends in that Administration were already spying on her mobile phone by 2002, according to a new report in Spiegel Online, NSA-Überwachung: Merkels Handy steht seit 2002 auf US-Abhörliste 26.10.2013. The article linked doesn't say what date in 2002 the spying on her phone started. Maybe that's part of why the Cheney-Bush crowd knew she would be a willing patsy for their war propaganda? This is part of how Angie the Great got a reputation for being loyally "pro-American." But her American pals obviously didn't and don't trust her much more than they trust the leaders of your run-of-the-mill rouge state. Go figure.

But it was also the red-green government of Schröder and Fischer that pushed through the neoliberal Agenda 2010 "reforms" that significantly reduced job security and income among German workers, which Frau Fritz has of course been happy to continue. The most notorious among the measures is known as Hartz IV, which promoted mini-jobs. In no small part as a result of "Aus der einstigen Auf- wurde eine Abstiegsgesellschaft" ("The upwardly-mobile society became a downwardly-mobile society"), wrote Albrecht von Lucke in Angela Merkel, sicher ist sicher Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 9/2013. Agenda 2010 wasn't the only thing that caused that effect. Von Lucke's point is that it was one of a series of events, including the depression that struck to Northern Atlantic world in 2007-8 and still continues, that contributed to a feeling of general insecurity among the German electorate, on which the SPD has failed to capitalize for their political benefit. They've spent so long being Frau Fritz' loyal followers, both in and outside of governmental coalitions with her, that they don't seem to be able to visualize much else.

The Die Zeit report on yet another sad symptom of this SPD trend in

The Süddeutsche Zeitung and Kraft bremst bei der Energiewende Süddeutsche Zeitung 26.10.2013 Hannelore Kraft bremst bei der Energiewende Die Zeit 26.10.2013. Germany is undertaking a program to transition to renewable energy, known as the "Energiewende," literally energy change or turning point. "Wende" is often used is German politics to designate some signficant political or policy inflection. Not surprisingly, it is a project with challenges, as Alexander Neubacher explains in Reality Check: Germany's Defective Green Energy Game Plan Spiegel International 10/25/2013. But Merkel's commitment to the Energiewende, including her decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany, allowed her to co-opt the environmental issue at the expense especially of the Green Party.

Now comes Hannelore Kraft, Minister-President (Governor) of the state (province) of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), criticizing the Energiewende for going too fast and possibly endangering jobs and raising energy costs for businesses. As Bauchmüller and Dörries put it, Kraft "wants to decisively represent the interests of the steel and energy industry in the coalition negotiations in Berlin" ("Hannelore Kraft will in den Koalitionsverhandlungen in Berlin entschieden die Interessen der Stahl- und Energieindustrie vertreten").

In other words, in the deal-making involved in building a new government with Frau Fritz' CDU, Kraft will be pushing to delay the push toward renewable energy, i.e., negotiating with Merkel's conservative party from the right, on behalf of the steel and energy industries. And up until a couple of weeks ago, Kraft had been the most prominent advocate for considering the alternative of going into opposition with the Greens and the Left Party instead of going meekly into another Grand Coalition as junior partners to Merkel's CDU. In other words, Kraft was seen as being to the left of the current national leaders of her party.

According to their report, both the energy company RWE and steel giant Thyssen-Krupp had recently threatened to eliminate jobs in NRW over the energy policies. When don't business lobbies make such threats?

Kraft's government in NRW is a red-green coalition. This latest Wende of hers will presumably complicate relations with the NRW Greens.

Kraft is heading the negotiations on energy for the SPD in the national coalition negotiations.

This is the neoliberal SPD.

Tags: angela merkel, gerhard schröder, hannelore kraft, joschka fischer

Joschka Fischer on the Egyptian revolution now

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer writes on the state of affairs in Egypt in Egypt after Morsi Project Syndicate 07/26/2013. As usual, he has some well-informed reflections:

Underlying the contradiction between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood is not only the question of religion, but also all of the social problems, including inequality, that riddle Arab societies. The Brotherhood has effectively assumed a role similar to that of left-wing European political parties in the nineteenth century. Whoever wants to weaken the Brotherhood has to address the urgent social issues that it raises and try to solve them.

This means that whatever solution ultimately prevails will be measured according to whether it can solve the economic crisis (particularly the lack of job opportunities for the young) and deepening mass poverty. The chances of this are slim.

Fischer is not saying that the Muslim Brotherhood is a leftwing party in today's political sense. They are a Muslim fundamentalist group of a definite conservative cast. American Republicans seem weirdly confused on that point.

Fischer describes the risks this way:

No one should deny that what happened in Egypt was a military coup, or that forces from former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime have returned to power. But, unlike in 2011, when the few pro-Western liberals and huge numbers of urban, middle-class youth rallied against Mubarak, now the same groups support the coup, lending it a certain (democratic?) legitimacy. Nonetheless, the overthrow of a democratically elected government by the military cannot be glossed over.

So what options does Egypt now have? Will it repeat the Algerian tragedy, in which the military canceled an election to prevent Islamists from assuming power, leading to an eight-year civil war that claimed up to 200,000 lives? Will the country return to military dictatorship? Or will Egypt end up with something like a Kemalist "democracy" of the type that long prevailed in Turkey, with a civilian government but the military pulling the strings? All three alternatives are possible, though it is impossible to predict which one will come to pass.

But one thing already can be said for certain: the basic distribution of power within Egyptian society has not changed. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood divide power between themselves. The Western-oriented liberals do not have any real power and stand, as we are seeing now, on the army’s shoulders. We should not forget that Morsi’s opponent in the presidential election in 2012 was Ahmed Shafik, a former general and the last Mubarak-era prime minister – certainly no liberal. [my emphasis]

The German version of Fischer's article is here, Die Rätsel der Sphinx.

Tags: egypt, joschka fischer

Joschka Fischer on global economic risks of an attack on Iran

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer wonders if we're looking at An Autumn Abyss? Project Syndicate 08/29/2012. His worry in this column focuses Middle East unrest and especially on the possibility of a war with Iran:

No one can predict the direction in which Egypt's Sunni Islamist president and parliamentary majority will lead the country. But one thing is clear: the Sunni Islamists are decisively altering the region’s politics. This regional re-alignment need not be necessarily anti-Western, but it surely will be if Israel and/or the United States attack Iran militarily. ...

A war in the Persian Gulf – still the world's gas station – would affect oil exports for some time, and energy prices would skyrocket, dealing a severe blow to a global economy that is teetering on the brink of recession.

China, already in economic trouble, would be hit hardest, along with the whole of East Asia. With the US also economically weakened and facing a presidential election, America’s leadership ability would be seriously constricted. And could a weakened Europe cope with an oil shock at all? A regional and global security shock caused by asymmetric warfare could add still further to the world economy’s troubles, causing exports to slump even more. [my emphasis]

The Western standoff with Iran won't end tomorrow, and there has been ebb and flow in the current phase, the dispute of Iran's nuclear capability, for years already.

Armin Azad argues that the recent summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) nations in Teheran has bolstered Iran's negotiating position (What Cable News didn’t Tell You: The Non-Aligned Movement Meeting Strengthened Iran’s Hand vs. US, Israel Informed Comment 09/04/2012):

No matter how the Iranian authorities present the results of this conference, the wide participation in the meeting could also be indicative of another point: many countries feel unhappy about being pressured by the U.S to take positions and/or act in ways in which they are not comfortable with or do not serve their interests. In this sense, their positions in the meeting might be interpreted as a sign of protest to the US and Israeli policies – rather than enthusiastic support for Iran.

However, the strong support of Non-Aligned movement for Iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy and particularly the right to have a full nuclear fuel cycle (uranium enrichment) may have the immediate impact of strengthening Iranian hand in its show down with the West over its nuclear issue. It may also make it more difficult for Israel to push forward its campaign to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

And Jim Lobe and Gareth Porter report for After Dempsey Warning, Israel May Curb War Threat Inter Press Service, 09/05/2012:

... Obama has gone further than ever before in warning Netanyahu not to expect U.S. backing in any war with Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters in Britain Aug. 30 that an Israeli strike would be ineffective, and then said, “I don’t want to be complicit if they (the Israelis) choose to do it.”

It was the first time that a senior U.S. official had made such an explicit public statement indicating the administration’s unwillingness to be a party to a war provoked by a unilateral Israeli attack. ...

One of Romney’s senior advisers, former CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, has even partially echoed Dempsey, telling the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Thursday that an Israeli raid against Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely be counter-productive.

Both Hayden’s and Dempsey’s remarks about the futility or counter-productivity of an Israeli attack on Iran echoed those of a broad range of Israel’s national-security elite, including President Shimon Peres and the former chiefs of Israel’s intelligence agencies and armed forces, who, provoked by Netanyahu’s and Barak’s war talk, have come out more strongly than ever against the idea.

But that doesn't mean that there is no pressure for making war on Iran. Nor that the Obama Administration is being publicly unambiguous in its opposition to war. Reuters reports in U.S. admiral visits Israel, discusses Iran with Barak 09/06/2012:

A top U.S. general visited Israel's defense minister on Thursday and discussed Iran, in a display of solidarity after the two allies differed publicly over what they fear is Tehran's drive towards nuclear weapons capability.

The vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral James Winnefeld smiled broadly, exchanging pleasantries with Ehud Barak in his office in Tel Aviv in a brief video released by the Israeli Defense Ministry.

Barak later said that they had "discussed regional issues and Iran, of course".

And the fact that Obama scrambled last week to restore the foolishly reckless Democratic Party platform position accepting Jerusalem as Israel's capital is a reminder of how deferential this Administration is to hawkish Israeli policies.

Tags: iran, iran war, israel, joschka fischer

Greece back in the spotlight of the European crisis this week

I haven't posted for several days about the European crisis. It has been going on so long that "European crisis continues" isn't exactly news. But it is a very serious deal and the outcome is highly unlikely to be good.

But there will be interesting reporting this week around senior Greek visits to Berlin to kiss Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel's ring. Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos arrives Monday. Prime Minister Ministerpräsident Antonis Samaras is schedule to meet with Frau Fritz on Friday. As usual, Angie is demanding more austerity, austerity, austerity. Avramopoulos and Samaras will beg for more time to comply with their killer austerity policies Frau Fritz and the EU have imposed on Greece. Rainer Buergin and Brian Parkin report (Schaeuble Rules Out New Aid Plan for Greece, Cites ‘Limits’ Bloomberg Businessweek 08/18/2012):

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble ruled out another aid program for Greece even though the country is in a “very difficult situation” with a shrinking economy.

“It can't be helped -- we can’t make yet another new program,” Schaeuble told visitors today at his ministry’s open day in Berlin. "There are limits."

Gross domestic product has declined by more than 20 percent in four to five years in Greece, which also has high unemployment, he said. Two bailouts totaling 240 billion euros ($296 billion) have been implemented for the nation since the European debt crisis began, and the country is now contending with austerity measures needed to qualify for more aid.

Yannis Ioannou depicts the EU leaders applauding as Greeks are tossed off a cliff in this 07/23/2012 cartoon he calls "Athens Festival":

Greece needs more bailout money, the next tranche due to be released this week, though Greece isn't technically in compliance with Frau Fritz' austerity demands to date. Spain is reportedly close to asking for one. As their economies shrink in the latest recession, their debt as a percentage of GDP will increase unless the debt is paid down at a faster rate than that at which their economies are shrinking. Jack Ewing reports on the current recession news in For Europe’s Economy, a Lost Decade Looms New York Times 08/16/2012:

The figures suggest that Europe is already well into what could become a lost decade — a period of pernicious stagnation and wasted potential that could have lasting effects on ordinary citizens.

Economic growth not realized represents investments in education that were never made, research that was never financed, businesses that failed and careers that ended too early or never got off the ground.

We're now half-way into such a lost decade in the United States, as well. But we don't have the problems Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal are having because we have our own currency, which is also the world's reserve currency. And also because there was a at least moderate stimulus during the Obama Administration, though we're more in austerity mode now.

Stephen Walt poses the same question our Savior-General and now CIA Director David Petraeus once asked about the Iraq War: 'Tell me how this ends': European edition Foreign Policy 08/17/2012. But even with great skepticism, he places way too much faith in the possibilities for austerity economics in a depression:

The happy ending to this story, if there is one, is that the various structural reforms now being imposed on these countries will simultaneously cut government costs (thereby freeing up money for debt service) and eventually trigger robust economic growth (thereby increasing tax revenues and providing even more money). But thus far this doesn't seem to be happening. Instead, we get recurring crises, each dealt with by some sort of hastily improvised mechanism mostly designed to kick the can down the road and wait for a miracle to occur. But unless the curves in the graphic cited above hit an inflection point and start heading upward, I don't see how this favorable outcome ever gets reached.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is juggling creative measures frantically, such as extensive lending directly to Greece, to keep the current eurozone afloat. Their charter does not allow them to officially perform an essential function of a central bank, which is to act as borrower of last resort for sovereign debt. They have found ways to do some of it through the backdoor.

If French President François Hollande is offering any meaningful resistance to Frau Fritz' destructive austerity policies, he's keeping it well concealed. He comes to Berlin Thursday, presumably mainly to show his diplomatic support for Angie's draconian policies prior to her meeting with Samaras the following day.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in an interview with Bild am Sonntag (Es war noch nie so gefährlich 19.08.2012), criticized Frau Fritz' government saying, "Die Grundfehler sind, dass die Regierung von Beginn an national und nicht europäisch agiert hat. Und dass zu spät und zu unentschlossen gehandelt wird." ("The fundamental errors are, that the government form the beginning on reacted on a national basis and not on a European one. And that it was dealt with too late and too indecisively.") And he warns about the financial impact on Germany from Frau Fritz' foolish policies: "Am Ende kommt dann meist die teuerste Variante heraus. Griechenland war am Anfang ein 50-Milliarden-Problem. Heute sind das ganz andere Dimensionen." ("In the end, the most expensive variant emerged. Greece at the beginning was a €50 billion problem. Today they are of a completely different dimension.")

Fischer describes the measures that would make the euro work without imposing economic and social catastrophe on much of the eurozone: a complete fiscal union, with eurobonds based on the credit-worthiness of the eurozone as a whole, common social policies such as standard retirement ages and common tax policies. Given the atrocious failure of European leaders to master the euro crisis the last few years, such a drastic change is exceptionally unlikely. And the clock is ticking on the current solution, which Fischer rightly believes cannot work; he says it's believing in an illusion to think it can.

But in this interview, he doesn't say he's given up hope for the EU or the euro. Not that he's starry-eyed about the possibilities. He says, "Je näher wir an den Abgrund kommen, desto klarer werden die Alternativen." ("The closer we come to the abyss, the clearer the alternatives will become.")

Fischer is addressing Germany's role and speaking from the pro-European (pro-EU) position. What he doesn't say is that for countries like Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, the "Argentine" alternative of leaving the currency union and defaulting on the sovereign debt is almost certainly a better alternative for their individual countries right now than staying in a likely-doomed currency union at the cost of what is really economic suicide with Frau Fritz' austerity policies.

Interestingly enough, Fischer does think Frau Fritz is aware that the consequences of a Greek exit from the euro are unpredictable. And that one of the live possibilities is that it would lead to bank runs in Spain and Italy, and "wäre das das Ende des Euro" ("that would be the end of the euro").

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, greece, joschka fischer

Egypt, Argentina, Brazil and the present and future of revolutions

The news about the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi winning the Egyptian Presidency made me think about Joschka Fischer's notion of the post-communist Eastern European revolutions as "revolution by implosion". There's good reason to think that this is what happened in the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt. I'm not sure it so much fits the Libyan or Syrian experience, where the civil war aspect seem more prominent.

This is brief video sketch of Morsi from Aljazeera English, Who is Mohamed Morsi? 06/24/2012:

Here is one on the results of the election, Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros reports from Cairo Aljazeera English 06/24/2012:

On Morsi's victory, see:

Kristen Chick, Muslim Brotherhood's Morsi becomes Egypt's first civilian president Christian Science Monitor 06/24/2012

Celebration in Egypt as Morsi declared winner Aljazeera English 06/24/2012

BBC News, Muslim Brotherhood's Mursi declared Egypt president 06/24/2012

Brotherhood Mursi wins Egyptian presidency Al Akhbar English 06/24/2012

Hatem Maher, 'Don't obey me if I don't fulfill promises': President-elect Mursi tells Egyptians Ahram Online 06/24/2012

Dan Murphy, Egypt has a new president: Let the fear mongering begin! Christian Science Monitor 06/24/2012;

Mark LeVine, Morsi's win is a victory for the revolution Aljazeera English 06/24/2012

Sherif Tarek, Mursi declared Egypt's first civilian president, but military remains in control Ahram Online 06/24/2012

Juan Cole has a useful commentary at his Informed Comment blog, Mursi and the Brotherhood in a Pluralist Egypt 06/24/2012: "despite the Orientalist impulse in Western writing to see everything in the Middle East as black and white, as fundamentalist or libertine, Egypt’s political geography has been revealed by this year’s elections to be diverse. It isn’t just puritans versus belly dancers."

Fischer's concept of "revolution by implosion" recognizes that actual revolutions that deserve the name can occur in even the most advanced countries with complex interlocking institutions, little or no geographically based tribalism, and sophisticated methods of social control that make any kind of mass armed uprising completely unfeasible.

Here it's worth noting events and processes in Latin America that aren't revolutionary in rhetoric or self-understanding but do challenge the dominant neoliberal model of deregulation and "free trade" on terms that overwhelmingly benefit multinational corporations and the One Percent. I have in mind here Argentina and Brazil, in particular. Venezuela is in a different mode of operation in that the Hugo Chávez' dominant political movement understands itself as the Bolivarian Revolution, i.e., explicitly revolutionary. Here I won't try to deal with the question of how much developments in Venezuela actually conform to the hostile image that is the conventional wisdom in the American press.

Argentina experience under its current "kirchnerist" economic model has acquired a new urgency of international attention because it has actually provided a constructive and democratic model of a successful exit from conditions that are currently faced by the "periphery" countries of the eurozone such as Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

(Kirchnerism refers to the policies pursued by Presidents Nestor Kirchner and his wife and successor Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the latter having been even more consequent in pursuing that direction that her late husband. Both are part of the Peronist Partido Justicialista (PJ), and kirchnerism could be described as a social-democratic variant of Peronism as distinguished from the neoliberal variant of Peronism. But Peronism itself is the most complex political movement to explain in ideological terms that I've even encountered, so I'm not sure how clarifying such a clarification is.)

Jamie Galbraith discusses Argentina and Brazil in his new book Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (2012):

Argentina and Brazil made similar transition, under similar conditions, from import substitution models to open market economies [as prescribed by neoliberal ideology], and both experienced the instability and stress associated with the neoliberal economic climate. In both cases, following large increases inequality has been made to decline in recent years, as the countries retreated - to a degree - from neoliberal globalization.

In particular, inequality fell in both countries as the share of income poassing through the financial sector and the riches urban centers declined; in both cases these phenomena between them explain most of the decline in economic inequality. ...

However, the two countries experienced these changes differently. In Argentina, the neoliberal model kept the country in a strong grip through the end of the 1990s, and inequality rose sharply alongside the relative position of the banks (and of Buenos Aires City) compared to the rest of the country. Only after the crisis in 2001 did Argentina begin to reverse these trends, amid a radical reshaping of the government and changed in the ideological climate. In Brazil, the largest increases in inequality had already occurred, beginning in 1982 with the debt crisis. Brazil was able substantially to stabilize its macroeconomic environment beginning in 1993, with the result that the hypertrophy of the financial sector peaked and inequality fell in the following years; a major element of this was a growing role for the public sector.

This pattern was established under the Cardoso government and continued under Lula, despite the change in party control and ideology. However, it was under Lula - operating under the vastly more favorable commodity and credit conditions of the 2000s - that poverty in Brazil moved dramatically downward.

This may seem far afield from the Arab Awakening and the Egyptian Presidential contest. And Galbraith's concern in his book is focused on the economics of inequality, his career specialty, than on political change as such. But he proceeds directly from the above quote to observe, "To the extent that a bilateral comparison can lead to valid generalization, we suggest that major political changes are triggered not so much by the direction of economic change but by its speed and abruptness." He suggests that Brazil's more gradual adoption of policies deviated from the neoliberal/Washington Consensus approach produced less dramatic political changes than those in Argentina, where the more constructive policies "were resisted ... until crisis and rebellion imposed them" in 2001-2.

Galbraith concludes his chapter on Argentina and Brazil with a somewhat enigmatic comment, "The result was an ideological overshoot in Argentina, compared to Brazil." I would be curious to know what he sees as the "ideological overshoot" of kircherismo. If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with the checkered history of Peronism. But he doesn't elaborate on the point in his book.

The Egyptian Revolution is still in an early stage, as the news reports and analyses linked above emphasize. The armed forces don't currently recognize the authority of the civilian President over them, for instance, so Egypt certainly cannot be said to have a secure democratic government. And though the Muslim Brotherhood is still treading carefully and Mohamed Morsi was generally seen by supporters of the democratic revolution and being more in their cause's interest than the military's candidate who lost, many supporters of secular democracy both inside and outside Egypt remain wary of the Brothers' intentions. And to our Christianist theocratic Republicans, any kind of Islamist party is the incarnation of the Devil.

What strikes me about the current Egyptian revolution in the context of Fischer's idea of "revolution by implosion" is that the fall of the old regime seems to fit that model. The Egyptian public didn't stage an armed uprising or conduct a civil war. Hosni Mubarak's regime certainly seemed to have had the physical force at its disposal to crush the popular protests by force, just as the East German Communist regime did in 1989, the year in which the People's Power movement there achieved its most dramatic breakthroughs. But the moment was such that the old regimes in both cases didn't see their way open with the political support that they perceived themselves having to hold back the popular upsurge. And the regimes that looked so formidable a few months earlier seemed to fold like a house of cards. Revolution By Implosion is a fitting concept to describe those events.

But as subsequent events in both cases showed, organization counts. A lot. In the East German case, those who had spearheaded the democratic revolution for years, often at great personal cost to themselves, for the most part found themselves sidelined politically in the elections of 1990. Those like Angela Merkel who linked up immediately with the established Western parties, which still had the formal trappings of an existence in East Germany even under the Communist regime, prospered far more than the dedicated reform-Communist activists who most actively promoted the anti-regime protests.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has led a long existence, spawning the jihadist ideology of Osama bin Laden's Al Qa'ida along the way. But in recent years it has moderated its goals and tactics, and has lead a strange, public and visible though unofficial existence. It was formally banned by Egyptian law, but was still able to run and elect candidates to the largely powerless Egyptian parliament. (In this, their situation was partially reminiscent of the German Social Democratic Party under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law of 1878-90.) And even though the Brothers didn't take a leading role in starting off the Arab Awakening movement in Egypt, their organization allowed them to take the leading position in the new institutional arrangements produced by the reform movement, as the Presidential election just dramatically illustrated.

In the cases of Argentina and Brazil, a dramatic divergence from the neoliberal consensus took place within the framework of established political parties reacting to the economic and political problems caused by the failures evident in the reality of neoliberal economics. Dramatic transformations took place within parties that were flexible and open enough for serious democratic reform: if "reform" is the right word for a rejection of the One Percenter international economic framework of neoliberalism.

Tags: argentina, brazil, egypt, james galbraith, joschka fischer

Joschka Fischer shocks German conservatives by telling the truth about Angela Merkel

Facing a real possibility of a near-term collapse of the eurozone and probably of the European Union as a result of her obsessive austerity policies, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is starting to sound helpless to do anything but continue on the same destructive path.

Patrick Donahue reported last week for Bloomberg News in Pressure Builds On Merkel As Spain Calls For Bank Aid 06/04/2012, just before the latest clunker of a Spanish bank rescue plan was announced:

As markets brace for further deterioration in Spain’s finance sector and a possible Greek departure from the 17-member euro area, the Canadian government said that finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven countries will hold a conference call tomorrow to discuss the European debt crisis.

Rajoy sought to open a new avenue of crisis fighting on June 2, when he added his voice to calls for a "banking union" in Europe involving a centralized system to re-capitalize lenders. Merkel shut off another potential solution the same day as she toughened her opposition to euro-area debt sharing, telling members of her party that "under no circumstances" would she agree to euro bonds.

Options "that resemble euro bonds" are conceivable after a process of European integration lasting "many years," Merkel’s chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters in Berlin today. For now, "it's up to national governments to decide whether they want to avail themselves of aid from the backstop and accept the conditions linked to it, and that of course also applies to Spain." [my emphasis]

If Angie is really thinking in terms of "a process of European integration lasting 'many years'" before she would even agree to eurobonds, which are a necessary element of solving the current crisis, and necessary this summer, I'd say she's lost without any good idea of how to move forward any any other way but austerity, austerity, austerity.

Former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer writes about The Threat of German Amnesia 05/25/2012 Project Syndicate, German version Europa am Abgrund. Though it's dated May 25, it's interesting to see that it didn't cause much of a stir until the 04.06.2012 Süddeutsche Zeitung published it under the online title of Europa steht in Flammen (Europe Is In Flames).

Now we've got the Financial Times Deutschland reporting that Fischer criticized Angie hard and almost called her a Nazi! (Peter Ehrlich, Harte Kritik an Merkel. Joschka Fischers ultimativer Beinahe-Nazi-Vergleich 04.06.2012) Fischer didn't almost call her a Nazi. What he does do in that piece is recall the highly relevant and important lesson that German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who served in that role from 1930-32 and applied Angie-like austerity policies to that depression. More precisely, he says:

The recent elections in France and Greece, together with local elections in Italy and continuing unrest in Spain and Ireland, have shown that the public has lost faith in the strict austerity forced upon them by Germany. Merkel’s kill-to-cure remedy has run up against reality – and democracy.

We are once again learning the hard way that this kind of austerity, when applied in the teeth of a major financial crisis, leads only to depression. This insight should have been common knowledge; it was, after all, a major lesson of the austerity policies of President Herbert Hoover in the United States and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in Weimar Germany in the early 1930’s. Unfortunately, Germany, of all countries, seems to have forgotten it. [my emphasis]

The consequence of continued depression and high unemployment didn't have the happiest aftermath in Germany. I thought until this current depression hit that it was generally understood that depressions allowed that drag on for a long time are potentially hazardous to democracy altogether. But it apparently isn't.

The part about which Ehrlich mainly complains, though, is Fischer's also-sensible conclusion:

Do we Germans understand our pan-European responsibility? It certainly does not look that way. Indeed, rarely has Germany been as isolated as it is now. Hardly anyone understands our dogmatic austerity policy, which goes against all experience, and we are considered largely off-course, if not heading into oncoming traffic. It is still not too late to change direction, but now we have only days and weeks, perhaps months, rather than years.

Germany destroyed itself – and the European order – twice in the twentieth century, and then convinced the West that it had drawn the right conclusions. Only in this manner – reflected most vividly in its embrace of the European project – did Germany win consent for its reunification. It would be both tragic and ironic if a restored Germany, by peaceful means and with the best of intentions, brought about the ruin of the European order a third time.

Elsewhere at the Süddeutsche Zeitung website, commentator Heribert Prantl seems to be having an American-style pearl-clutching hissy fit:

Für die Schärfe dieser Kritik gibt es keinen Vergleich. Noch kein früherer Außenminister hat mit der Politik der Nachfolgeregierung so zornig und drastisch, so furios und brutal, so besorgt und alarmiert abgerechnet. Joschka Fischer wirft der Kanzlerin vor, sie lösche den Brand Europas mit Kerosin.

[There no comparison for the sharpness of this criticism. Never has a former Foreign Minister passed judgment on the policy of a successor regime so angrily and drastically, so furiously and brutally, Joschka Fischer accuses the Chancellor of putting out the European fire with gasoline.]

Lawdy, Miss Mellie, bring me the smellin' salts! Honey, I'm about to just faint dead away! That ruffian criticized the Chancellor! Why, that's just not done in polite society!!

I guess Herr Prantl just slept through all those stories over the last, oh, 40 years or so about Fischer's one-time role as a street-fighting militant in Frankfurt. But please don't anyone tell him that. The poor man's likely to have a heart attack on the spot.

Prantl in that piece doesn't offer much in the way of solutions to the euro crisis, only vague platitudes about the need for Germany to be active and how Angie is a nice lady with good intentions.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, greece, joschka fischer