Stardate 20040516.1536

(Captain's log): My friend Andrew lives in Berlin. He and I go way back; I first met him online in a netnews discussion group about the OS/2 operating system. More recently, he has sometimes written to me to try to clarify aspects of the internal German political situation, often because he felt that my condemnation of Joschka Fischer was not entirely warranted.

I've learned a lot from his letters, but I don't always agree with him. He wrote to me today and included a link to an article in which two MEP's from the Green Party publicly disagree with the decision to award this year's Sakharov Prize to the UN.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the European Parliament decided to award the prize to the UN mostly as a way of spiting and rebuking the US, especially in light of recent revelations about mismanagement and graft associated with the UN's administration of the "Oil for Food" program. There's now significant reason to suspect that UN institutional objection to the Anglo-Australo-American invasion of Iraq was partly motivated by a desire to keep Saddam in power so that the graft could continue, irrespective of the consequences for the Iraqi people. That's not exactly true to the heritage of Andrei Sakharov.

In addition to that link, Andrew included the following comments:

I am sending you this link not only because I think you might be interested in the subject but also because I want to correct what I consider a number of misconceptions you have about European politics.

1. Joschka Fischer and the other right-wing of the Green Party (which includes Mr Cohn-Bendit above) are not among those who rejected US policy but among those most supportive. Your impression of Fischer is correct regarding his absolute position on the issue, but I believe you have no idea how much more dishonest and anti-American most German politicians (and the voters) are. Fischer and other right-wing Greens are among the most militant, pro-American, pro-Israel politicians we have, not among the most "pacifists", anti-American, anti-Semitic politicians, as you sometimes seem to think. Yes, I realise this doesn't bode well for Germany and Europe in absolute terms, but that's how it is. (Note that this doesn't apply for the larger left wing of the Green party.)

It seems as if Andrew is damning Fischer with faint praise. Is it really accurate to refer to him as pro-American, pro-Israel?

Or would it be better to say that he is more pro-American than most other German politicians? Or alternatively (and less kindly), that he is less anti-American than most other German politicians?

Ignoring comparisons and local political context, I have a hard time accepting a claim that Fischer is pro-American in any absolute sense. He still seems anti-American to me.

Of course, that can be hard for an outsider to judge since most of what we see is him in his role as Foreign Minister, where he carries out policy set by the Chancellor whether he really agrees with it or not.

Andrew has in the past explained to me a peculiarity of practice of the parliamentary system in Germany: in a coalition government, by convention the leader of the largest party becomes Chancellor and the leader of the second party becomes Foreign Minister. Despite that, the actual foreign policy of the government is set by the Chancellor, not by the Foreign Minister. The Foreign Minister is expected to carry out the Chancellor's foreign policy even if he disagrees with it.

So most of what Fischer says that we Americans learn about from the news is the result of him acting as Schröder's mouthpiece, and doesn't necessarily indicate anything about his own opinions and positions.

Even so, in situations where Fischer seems to be less bound by Schröder's position than usual, where he is speaking as himself rather than as Foreign Minister, he still doesn't come across as supportive or sympathetic to America.

And even if it were true that he disagrees with Schröder's anti-Americanism, he apparently doesn't think it is sufficiently important to justify walking out of the government. So the most generous conclusion we could come to is that even if he is silently pro-American, his commitment is not very strong.

I don't really recall seeing anything recently from any prominent German political figure which I would consider an indication that they were pro-American, except in very rare situations where declarations of support are pretty much pro-forma. Whether that's because prominent German politicians are all adept at reading the direction the wind is blowing, and are tuning their public message to the prevailing German anti-American zeitgeist, or whether it's because politicians who actually are pro-American and are willing to say so don't become prominent, is not easy to determine. Probably it's some of both.

The last time I remember any political rhetoric in Germany that looked pro-American was in the runup to the German elections in 200209, when the German opposition leader who posed the greatest threat to Schröder ran on a somewhat-pro-American platform (sort of). I no longer even remember the name of that opposition leader; he's sunk from sight. (And Andrew later pointed out that his power base was Bavaria, which would have