The New Nation - Internet Edition

Axel Brot

Not so many years ago, many hoped Europe might step up as a counterweight to US imperial policies. Such hopes were focused in particular on Germany - not only as the leading European power, but as a known moderating, non-military force in international politics.

US vituperation of the reputed European preference for diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution as well as official Britain, in the person of Richard Cooper, former prime minister Tony Blair's international-relations guru, deemed it necessary to lecture "post-industrial Europe" about the need for "double standards" and colonial ruthlessness to beat down benighted non-Westerners, seemed to give substance to these hopes.

Well, Germany and the European Union did step up - but rather differently than expected. And it was no electoral twitch that set the stage for "better be wrong with the United States than being right against it". Since Angela Merkel's visit to Washington (as the conservative opposition leader) on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, to denounce then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's decision to oppose the war, the return to US good graces was not only the main conservative foreign-policy project; it turned rapidly into the supreme project of the German political class - including the Social Democrats.

Merkel became the chancellor-to-go-to, the most trusted European interlocutor for the US political class to work jointly and determinedly to harden US global hegemony against the consequences of America's Iraq-inflicted weakness - this not only in the wider Middle East but also, and especially, with regard to Russia and China, the Bush administration's original enemy of choice before the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" consumed so much of its political capital.

Overcoming the domestic constraints on its ability to use the German army more extensively for "humanitarian interventions", for the defense of "Western civilization" against Islamist terrorism, is an important, though not the most important, part of the Merkel government's "the West united behind the US" policy. Notwithstanding the absence of public debate on its strategic implications - eg, of the US (and Israeli) doctrine of preventive war, the abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's geographical restrictions, the mission of "securing access to raw materials" - the rejection on general principles of a more activist military role by a majority of Germans has not (yet) been overcome.

This has far-reaching consequences: it has, in a significant way, rebooted German elite attitudes and expectations toward the EU, and toward Germany's relationship with France. The public discourse about foreign policy as well as the underlying elite mindset is changing - from "responsibly conservative" to the channeling of the demons Hannah Arendt dealt with in her search for the origins of 20th-century disorder: (British) imperialism, Western militarism and racism. And since the majority of Germans is (again) far behind the curve of elite opinion, the efforts of "re-educating" them (as Der Spiegel recently demanded again) are as consistently strident as they are mythologizing.

But there are also quite a number of senior officials and politicians, still serving or retired, who are looking with dismay or worry at the evolution of German policies in response to the crisis of US-German relations. Their publicly voiced concerns are focused on the expansion of German military commitments - of the easy to get into, but next to impossible to get out of sort - and the rapid deterioration of relations with Russia.

In addition, among the small number of senior experts on international economics, a majority are looking with deep foreboding at the mounting instabilities of the international financial system. They see them driven by the huge trade imbalances of the US and the growing threat to leverage them against the creditor nations - in particular against China, Russia, and the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that are running large surpluses.

The US congressionally mandated financial sanctions against such countries as Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea are taken, moreover, as indicators that the United States is about to destroy the trust the international financial system is based upon. The consequences of its eventual - sooner rather than later - meltdown will be dramatic and uncontrollable.

These warning voices are, though, in the wings of the German debate. The stage is held by the narrative of the terrorist menace. But there are very few serious experts who sincerely believe that Islamist terrorism is motivated by their hate for "Western freedoms and values". Hate and the desire for revenge are certainly crucial elements; but this has not much to do with Western culture or with the alleged humiliating realization of Muslim inferiority.

If one should be looking for causes, the decades of violence the West visited upon these countries, either directly or through its dependent regimes, is a necessary part of the explanation. The other part, of course, would have to face the fact that it was the West that transformed weak and isolated fundamentalist cells into its terrorist Golem. It nurtured, trained, financed, organized and used it for decades in terror campaigns against secular nationalist and socialist regimes and movements until those were defeated or isolated, leaving their compromised remnants to do the Western bidding.

Though Germany was not in the forefront of Middle East meddling, it was fully engaged in creating and empowering a Wahhabi-Salafist coalition to fight the Soviets and the communist regime in Afghanistan - the central front in the global anti-communist offensive that appeared to have turned terrorism on three continents into the Western weapon of choice.

And for the Middle East this still seems to be the case. It is seen in the Western use of Sunni terror groups (and the anti-Iranian-government Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, as well as the Iranian sister organization of the Kurdistan Workers Party) against Iran, and against the ascendent Shi'ites in Lebanon.

But the mythologization of al-Qaeda and the "clash (in German, war) of civilizations" serves to legitimize the readiness for endless war. In the words of a retired German official: "We have been walking the world over the cliff, and are falling into a sea of blood."

All of this does not only involve ideological re-rigging. In the US wake, Germany is running up the pennant of permanent war. The following should serve to provide a view into some of its particulars.

The German-French tandem Since 1966, after France left the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military integration, Germany has been France's primary partner, and the French-German tandem was the active core that drove the European Economic Community toward the European Union. Germany handled the tension between its close relationship with the US and the one with France by compartmentalizing: with France, Europe; with the US, NATO and security.

But notwithstanding the efforts to prevent conflicts developing between these two poles of German foreign policy, there was always a strong tendency within the German political class to regard the process of European integration as leading toward an increasing autonomy of European interests and policies from those of the US. The US did not see it differently - particularly after the end of the Cold War. The administrations of Bill Clinton and George H W Bush invested, therefore, a lot of political capital and cunning to prevent that from occurring. Both administrations considered the European relationship with Russia as the key for the viability of such a project and the EU's and NATO's new east European members as the lever to assure its abortion.

But with the alliance crisis of 2002-03 - also, depending on the perspective, the apogee or the nadir of the French-German duo - the US was able to mobilize not only the political elites of the new

NATO - and EU - members of eastern Europe as well as those of Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain against the specter of an independent European course. It was the revolt of the French and German US-oriented elites - expressing itself publicly in an incessant and thorough media campaign - that sealed its fate. All of a sudden, the German-French special relationship had lost much of its salience. The horizon of the kind of European integration the United States considered a threat to its own international role revealed itself as much more of a mirage than it appeared before it was put to the test.

Chancellor Merkel is the German incarnation of this revolt. And the lionized champion of the collective European right, the Americans, and the Israelis, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the ideal French president for turning Merkel's great foreign-policy project into a joint venture: welding the EU to the US, making European integration serve the US-dominated, Western international order - whatever the cost.

It is not as if former French president Jacques Chirac and his foreign and military policy bureaucracies had still been able to put the brakes on Merkel. After confronting the US on the Iraq issue in 2002-03, together with then-chancellor Schroeder, and having maneuvered Russian President Vladimir Putin into taking the same stance, Chirac's political will was exhausted and prospects for a more independent European road in international politics was dead. Schroeder's capacity to act in tandem with Chirac was increasingly circumscribed by his domestic weakness; and the US reminded the French administration forcefully of what it means to play hardball with French interests. He was stymied, like Schroeder, by the neo-conservative/neo-liberal, US-oriented majority of the elites.

After 2003, French policies followed Germany somewhat listlessly in supporting the US ones, in particular in the wider Middle East - though still trying to play their own game in Lebanon, while egging on the Americans and Israelis against Syria and Iran. Nevertheless, while conceding the game in the Middle East, Chirac and Schroeder still tried to create a stable framework of relations with Russia and China, the basis of something like a Eurasian common economic region. This notion has already joined the might-have-beens of history.

Neither would have led the election of Sarkozy's competitor, Segolene Royal, to a greatly different conception of French foreign policy. Royal was groomed by Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist president who had brought to perfection the art of decorating with left-wing flourishes an exceedingly hard-nosed, rather vicious, covert-operations approach to foreign policy.

In fact, the different versions of the French Socialist Party after World War II were never known for particularly salubrious policies: from their alliance with the Corsican heroin mafia in Marseilles to their support of French colonial wars, from bombing Greenpeace ships to involvement in the Ruanda genocide. There is nothing surprising, therefore, that both Royal and Sarkozy are close to the particularly shrill French version of "humanitarian interventionists", drawing from the same stock of civilizational warriors that dominates French public discourse.

Sarkozy's choice for foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, is therefore less of a peace offering to the Socialists than an indicator of ideological commitments. Kouchner is not only one of the ideological godfathers of "anti-totalitarian, humanitarian interventionism", he is also the one under whose benevolent eyes - in his function as its United Nations administrator - Kosovo acquired the makings of the first, ethnically almost pure, European mafia-state. During the 1980s, some of his Medecins du Monde (which he founded after splitting from the Medecins sans Fronticres) assisted the Afghan mujahideen with somewhat more than medical-only rear services.

Though he might not be tainted with aiding the Americans (as some suspected), as other non-governmental organizations are, in turning the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand into bases for the reconstitution of the Khmer Rouge as US proxies, his record, nevertheless, justifies Colin Powell's famous dictum about NGOs as US "force multipliers" avant la lettre: human rights and medical services for US friends and clients, none for the opposition.

Sarkozy's ideological baggage also contains the French-Israeli business lawyer Arno Klarsfeld,a rather hysterical campaigner for the rights of Israel and the defense of Western civilization as well as the son of noted Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.

He volunteered in 2002 to serve in the Israeli Defense Force and accompanied the Israeli border guards as a member on their rampage through the Palestinian territories. Klarsfeld was Sarkozy's leading candidate for heading the controversial new Ministry for Immigration and National Identity - a move comparable to Bush proposing right-wing Israeli political leader Avigdor Liebermann as the head of a new department for Hispanics, Muslims and African-Americans. For the time being, though, Sarkozy seems to have reconsidered this exceedingly provocative appointment.

Widely quoted as mentor and inspirer of Sarkozy's "anti-totalitarian" outlook is philosopher André Glucksmann: one of the many minor embodiments of Hannah Arendt's insight about the French haute bourgeoisie's romantic infatuation with the rhetorical bombast of ideological rogues and the titillations of violence. During the 1980s he marketed nuclear war as an antidote against the European addiction to peace and to save humanity - and Western civilization - from communism. After the Soviet collapse, he agitated for Europe to join any American or Israeli war in reach against the "new Hitlers" (Milosevicz, Saddam Hussein, Arafat, Assad, etc) and "Islamofascists", as well as for his kind of moral policies against "totalitarian" China and "newly-totalitarian" Russia.

These attractions, however, did not remain limited to the Parisian salons and media: As the preferred French interlocutor for castigating the German lack of martial fiber, while in Germany Glucksmann briefly replaced on "high-brow" TV the well-respected, though liberal and measured, specialist on German-French relations, Professor Alfred Grosser. In 2002, Grosser had committed the rather deadly mistake of criticizing instead of defending Israel's right to do as it likes in the Palestinian territories. He disappeared from German screens as did many of the German correspondents of the public media who had failed to appreciate the Palestinians as the new Nazis.

In view of the fact that most European mainstream conservative parties (and even some Social Democratic currents) propagandize the immigrant issue increasingly in terms of the "clash of civilizations" and the "new antisemitism", they have spurred an interesting change of orientation in the extreme right with all the potential for open (like in Denmark or Italy) or tacit alliances (like in Spain).

The extreme right (Front National, Vlaams Belang, Lega Nord, Allianza Nazionale, Parti van de Vrijheit etc) and its nebula of goon squads have also been busy building bridges to Israel and to the violence-inclined, but tightly leashed, Zionist right (Likud Europe, Betar, Jewish Defense League, etc) in the struggle against "Eurabia". One might, therefore, wonder whether Sarkozy has not already taken his commitment to fight against the "new antisemitism" and to defend French "national identity" a tad too far. Given the thousands of maimed or dead Arab, Asian, and African immigrant victims of racial violence in Western Europe during the last 15 years - underinvestigated, underreported, and underprosecuted in Germany as well as France - one might even wonder whether the call to arms against the rise of antisemitism is not misdirected and whether Sarkozy and his circle do not do double duty as arsonists in the fire-brigade.

Bur Sarkozy is not only a civilizational warrior. He and his advisers - the CEOs of the largest media conglomerates and the insurance business - are committed to a radical restructuring of the distribution of power between the patronat and the unions, between state and society, between the workers and the haute bourgeoisie.

Sarkozy has marketed himself as the energetic executor of a consensus in search of an executor for the last 20 or so years. Delegitimizing the whole system of social protections with their institutional underpinnings has been at the center of what amounted to a psychological warfare campaign against the idea that there is a legitimate claim on social justice. After several false starts, this program seems to have found with him the echoes of the pre-World War II deep right's "patrie, famille, travail", instead of "liberté, fraternité, égalité".

Even the Socialist leadership, not at all discomfited by Royal's defeat - as testified by its well publicized collective sigh of relief - is into the spirit of things. French Socialist Party politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn's "the red flag is in the mud for good" phrase renders unsurprising that not a few voters might have pondered the advantages of getting the unavoidable up front instead of in fits, starts, and misdirection.

Neither the French elites, nor the German chancellor, nor the US, are in the mood for dealing with qualms and hesitations a la Royal. Sarkozy, in contrast, has the intention, the will, the energy, the support of the political class, as well as the conception of himself as the right man for the job, to pull France to the American good side. A "noble competition" between Merkel and Sarkozy might even be shaping up, regarding who is going to work more closely with the US - especially since Merkel is at a disadvantage. She is burdened with a Social Democratic coalition partner trying to save the remnants of Schroeder's Russian policies and under pressure from the pacifist left, and more importantly, from a new, non-sectarian left-wing party that is eating into its electorate and party membership.

Given the fact that the majority of the German political class and the media are running again a high Russophobe fever, there is not much chance that these remnants will be salvageable. It is, instead, possible that Germany will join in when a sufficiently strong catalyzing event tips relations with Russia into a no holds barred effort to get to the end of the "Russian problem". In the meantime, the Russians will carry on as if they had a "strategic partner" in Merkel, and Merkel will continue to signal her dissatisfaction with Russia's delivering on Western demands - and leave it to the Social Democratic leadership to deal with its nostalgia.

Refitting Turkey for its proper role

One of the most interesting policy initiatives of the new German-French tandem may appear to be a sideshow but is, in fact, emblematic of the shape of things to come: replacing the EU horizon for Turkey with one more fitting for an oriental strategic asset.

Merkel and Sarkozy are now jointly leading an EU-wide coalition dead set against making good on the decades-old promise for the integration of Turkey into the EU as soon as it is able to implement the acquis communautaire (total body of EU law). With the election of Sarkozy the "open-ended" accession negotiations have no chance of remaining open-ended and with his help Merkel will be able to outmaneuver her Social Democratic baggage while still insisting on negotiating with Turkey in good faith.

For Merkel, Sarkozy and their civilizational warriors, Turkey has no European "vocation", for cultural, Christian, and occidental reasons. Merkel promises, instead, a "special relationship" and Sarkozy proposes to sponsor a "Mediterranean community", anchored on Turkey, Israel and Morocco, as a geopolitical barrier against African immigrants, Islamic fundamentalists, and as an additional venue for Israeli ambitions.

The question, though, is how to make Turkey give up its EU aspirations and fall into line with whatever plans are made for it. And the main problem is, in fact, that Turkey's most committed Europeanists are to be found in the moderately conservative and moderately religious center-right Justice and Development (AKP) party, the first governing party after World War II which is fairly clean, rather competent economically, and tenaciously digging at the immensely corrupt and criminal "deep state": the conglomerate of politicians, military intelligence, special police squads, and their legions of cut-outs, cut-throats, and patsies, the Turkish mafia, Grey Wolves (ie, rightwing terrorists), feudal landowners, and associated business ventures.

This government is trying to drain a swamp in which German intelligence was up to its knees since the days of its being tasked with chaperoning the "Trident" intelligence coordination between the Turkish, Iranian, and Israeli intelligence services.

Turkey's "deep state" has been (and, to some degree, still is) the enabling environment - and with Israel, the Eastern Mediterranean hub - for the interbreeding of intelligence, the security business, terrorist groups for hire, and mafia operations. It has produced the strangest, rather frightening, but most lucrative, hybrids between black operations, subversion, targeted killings and kidnappings, and the whole panoply of the drug, protection, organ harvesting, black medical research and pharmacology, the emigration, slave labor, weapons and technology, counterfeiting, money laundering rackets. Joined to Israel's netherworld, its reach extends from the Arab countries to Africa, from Russia and the CIS to western and Central Asia, and, of course, to Europe.

This is what the Turkish government - with a strong popular mandate - is trying to reform in order to conform to the requirements of EU membership. The AKP is, for good reasons, strongly committed to the EU: by itself it would be quite unable to make its sanitation mandate work, whatever the strength of its electoral base.

It is only via the EU that it can even approach the holy of holies, the constitutional Praetorian prerogative of the Turkish military. Its defenders - the parties of the secular "White Turks" (ie, the urban elites) who regard the reforms the EU accession process imposes as endangering their ownership of the state - are precisely those Sarkozy and Merkel are relying on to derail Turkey's EU prospects.

The White Turks' "deep state" is already swinging into action: from a spate of high-profile murders with an ostensible "fundamentalist" background, to the threat of a military coup d'état, from the demonstrations with the malicious slogan "neither.

(To be continued)