German squawk, American hawk

The media failed to report last week the single most important piece of news: the World War II had ended! Gerhard Schroeder has won a second...

The media failed to report last week the single most important piece of news: the World War II had ended! Gerhard Schroeder has won a second term as chancellor only because he upheld Germany’s opposition to what George Bush is planning for Iraq. Until as recently as the beginning of September, the polls were going the other way. Economic recession in Germany is so acute and unemployment is growing so fast that the issue was initially immigration. That changed when the blundering Bush insisted that the US as hegemon had the unbridled right to wage war where he liked, against whom he liked, for whatever cause he wished.

Schroeder won when the German minister of justice succinctly compared Bush to Hitler. She lost her job in the process, but signalled the emergence of an independent voice in Berlin for the first time since Germany crumbled in World War II. The language of the German chancellor is what we once used to hear from Nehru, Nasser and Tito. The Non-aligned Movement stands silenced but a new voice for peace is rising in central Europe. ‘History,’ said T.S. Eliot, ‘has many cunning passages.’ And none more cunning than the rite of passage devised in the recent German election. For the same Germany, which twice took the world to disaster in the 20th century, is now poised to save the 21st century.

That this has so happened is no coincidence. Germany is the single most populous and prosperous country in the European Union. Moreover, geography has placed it at the centre of Europe. Collective guilt muted its voice for 50 years and more. And it has allowed itself to behave like the nation it was and is — an occupied country paying penance for the excesses of its past. If it is coming into its own, it is because Gerhard Schroeder, like the overwhelming majority of German voters in the last elections, was born after the Nuremberg trials. He is also the first chancellor elected by a united Germany. Free, therefore, of the complexes of both defeat and partition, he came up from behind to win an unexpected second term only because he outbid his opponent in the final phase of the campaign in voicing Germany’s warnings against incipient Hitlerism in foreign policy across the Atlantic. If Hitler’s marching song was, ‘Deutschland uber Alles’ (Germany above everyone else), Schroeder’s is ‘Deutschland uber Allies’!

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The new voice of resurgent Germany is a voice that is being shushed. The dismissal of the former minister of justice is one indication of this. But that it is being voiced at all is a turning point of the highest significance. For even if the present German squawk does not deter the American hawk, the hegemon has been put on notice that not all his allies are the push-over that Britain is. When Britain lost its empire and discovered at Suez in 1956 that it could no longer with impunity send its gunboats up the Yangtze — at least not without a Yankee pilot at the helm — it decided to ride to glory piggy-back on the Americans. Any pretence to independence in foreign policy was foregone in the pursuit what Britain fondly regarded as its ‘special relationship’ with Washington. London did not want to follow Paris, particularly the France of Charles de Gaulle, as the odd man out.

De Gaulle ended as no more than the joker in the pack because he lacked the economic muscle and political clout to fulfil his ambition of France becoming an alternative fulcrum of a new world order. Germany, on the other hand, is no longer hemmed in as it was from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl as much by its present as by its past. The looming shadow of the Soviet Union has been removed and half the country is no more in hock to the enemy. Germany is thus set to occupy the place for which it has been predestined by its geography and economy and the immense talent of its people.

It is the German people who have said a clear and uncompromising ‘No’. Their ‘No’ is being echoed in every corner of Europe, this side of the English Channel

There is enormous resentment in the European Union over the subordinate role assigned to EU and even NATO by Washington, DC. Till now, however, it has been an impotent rage. The EU were upped over military action in former Yugoslavia, in their own backyard as it were, by US unilateralism. Having secured in Belgrade the favoured US foreign policy goal of ‘regime change’, the US is now hunting for other regimes to change. Arafat once topped the list; he has now been toppled as Target No. One by Saddam Hussein, ‘the man who tried to kill my father’. For this mediaeval reason, the Iraqi people are about to be bombed to smithereens. Europe objects but even Schroeder disguises his reservations in diplomatic innuendo. It is the German people who have said a clear and uncompromising ‘No’. Their ‘No’ is being echoed in every corner of Europe, this side of the English Channel.

It is highly unlikely that the muted voices of dissent coming out of Europe will dissuade Bush from doing to Baghdad what Franco and Hitler did to Guernica. But the Eurasian land mass is stirring. Our foreign office, alas, is still caught in the time-warp of the Nineties. Instead of cravenly submitting to the US quest for global dominance, South Block should be forging ties with the emerging forces of European non-alignment. Our diplomatic resources should be redeployed out of London to Brussels, Berlin and Paris. And as a first step to this end, we should return to Her Majesty’s crown estates our high commissioner’s residence at 9, Kensington Palace Gardens, and get back as much of the 22 million pounds sterling we have paid to keep our poor country in preposterous luxury in one of the least significant capitals in the world. Indeed, why not concurrently accredit one of our staff in Washington as high commissioner to London, given whose lap-dog the British bulldog has now become?

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