Germany, I think it’s fair to say, is the most anti-nuclear country on earth. I just returned from a few days in Berlin, where the news was dominated by protests over the weekend against the transportation of nuclear waste from German nuclear power stations to Gorleben in Lower Saxony. The protests were seen as a triumph for the German anti-nuclear movement, which opposes the current centre-right government’s recent decision to extend the life of the remaining nuclear power plants in Germany. Germans are of course also passionately opposed to nuclear weapons, as illustrated by Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle’s attempt to remove the remaining US nuclear weapons from the country (see my essay in Prospect last year on this). But one thing puzzles me about this anti-nuclear attitude. If the Germans are so opposed to nuclear power and weapons, why, as I suggested in a previous post, are they apparently so relaxed about the prospect of a nuclear Iran?
Archive for the 'international relations' Category
Germany’s anti-nuclear lacuna
Published November 10, 2010 German politics , international relations 4 CommentsTags: Germany, Iran
Neoconservatism and the New Left
Published August 8, 2010 1968 generation , America , international relations , Israel 3 CommentsTags: 1968, Auschwitz, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, neoconservatism
My colleague Justin Vaïsse has just published an illuminating new history (it was published in French a few years ago but just came out in English) of the American neoconservative movement , which, he argues, can be divided into three distinct phases. First, between 1967 and the mid-seventies, it was a movement of left-wing New York intellectuals who were preoccupied with domestic issues and in particular critical of liberal social policy. Second, from the mid-seventies through to the end of the eighties, it was a movement of centrist Democrat activists who opposed the isolationist turn of the party on foreign policy under McGovern and Carter but also rejected Kissinger’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Finally, from the mid-nineties onwards, it was a movement of right-wing Republicans who believed in a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy and in particular in the use of American power to promote democracy in the post-Cold War world – including, of course, in Iraq.
The German question
Published June 24, 2010 German foreign policy , international relations Leave a CommentTags: euro, Germany
Over the last few months, Germany has been getting a lot of flak. To many observers, the euro crisis has revealed a more inward-looking and nationalistic Germany that is pursuing its national interests more aggressively than before. For example, a couple of weeks ago the philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote of a “solipsistic mindset” in Germany. In the new issue of the magazine Cicero, which came out yesterday, another éminence grise, the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, accused Angela Merkel of “Wilhelmine pomposity”. I agree that there is a profound, and in some ways worrying, shift taking place in German foreign policy. But, as I argue in an essay in the July issue of Prospect, which comes out today, it is a complex shift that actually goes back beyond Merkel to the “red-green” government of Gerhard Schröder. I also think the references to the Kaiserreich are a little misleading. If Germany is becoming more nationalist, it is in a quite different way than in the nineteenth century.
Germany and Iran
Published January 27, 2010 German foreign policy , international relations , Israel , Nazism 1 CommentTags: Auschwitz, Germany, Iran, Israel
Today, on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, German politicians will once again express contrition for the Holocaust, as they have since Helmut Schmidt became the first German chancellor to visit Auschwitz in 1977. But does “working through the past”, as Theodor Adorno put it in a famous essay in 1959, mean anything in Germany today beyond simply commemorating the past? In particular, should the Nazi past play a role in German foreign policy? If so, it must surely mean that Germany should do everything it can to prevent Iran, the world’s most openly anti-Semitic regime whose president denies the Holocaust and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, from acquiring nuclear weapons. But is it?
Waiting for Gilad
Published October 3, 2009 international relations , Israel 1 CommentTags: Germany, Israel
Israel obtained a video showing Gilad Shalit alive today in exchange for the release of 19 Palestinian women from its jails. The 23 year-old Israeli soldier was captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid in the summer of 2006 and since then there had been no evidence he was alive. Reading from a piece of paper in a voice in a breaking voice, he says he dreams of the day of his release and hopes the current government reaches a deal. Hamas is demanding the release of up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted terrorists, in exchange for Shalit’s release.
What does Hamas want?
Published September 12, 2009 international relations , Israel Leave a CommentTags: anti-Semitism, Israel
The Israeli historian Benny Morris is pessimistic about the prospect of a revival of the Middle East peace process, which he says is doomed to failure not because of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reluctance to freeze the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories but simply because the Palestinians have never accepted – and still refuse to accept – the idea of a two-state solution. Morris argued in an op-ed in the Guardian yesterday that neither Hamas nor even Fatah accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He suggests that there has not been much change since eighty years ago when Palestinian leaders held the all-or-nothing view that “we will push the Zionists into the sea, or they will send us back into the desert”.
