The German Election

Joe, welcome back to Berkeley.

Thank you for having me back.

So what happened during the German elections?

You mean in terms of foreign policy?

In terms of foreign policy, yes.

Well, Chancellor Shroeder was up for reelection, had been trailing for many months by about six, seven points, unbudgeable, six, seven points. But in the summer, he grasped the last straw, if you wish, which was the East German electorate: 60 million people, strongly pacifists, who had grown up under communism, anti-Americanism, pacifism, anti-Westernism thought -- a very volatile electorate. So here's a way to corral the East German vote: he shifted towards mildly anti-American pacifism by castigating Bush, castigating the war, proclaiming that though an ally, Germany would never support adventurism. His ratings crept up and he kept going at it, all the way to saying that Germany would not even join the war without a clear UN mandate.

As a result, he just barely squeaked in, but he squeaked in. And so he was re-elected. That's what happened in the summer of 2002.

Should we have expected this of him because he was a member of the sixties generation, or was he just being a pragmatic politician who was going where the votes were?

A little yes to both, but another yes to a question which you didn't ask, which is, yes, we could have expected this not only for biographical reasons, not only for the pragmatic reasons. But in the meantime, something much bigger had happened in world politics, namely the collapse of the Soviet Union, this self-dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas day of '91, the lifting of an enormous strategic dependence that the Germans had on the United States throughout the Cold War for forty years. And so Shroeder was free to act in ways that no chancellor of the Federal Republic, left or right, would have dared, as long as Soviet tanks were ensconced about twenty-five miles outside of Hamburg.

So the key variable to explain that is not just personality and not just pragmatism, but a historic strategic change in the power equation, a distribution of power in Europe, as a result of the end of bipolarity, the end of the Soviet Union. That suddenly allowed German chancellors to act in ways they would not have acted, would not have dared to act while those short arms were still poised to lunge across the Fulda Gap.

As a Realist, how do you view the consequences of his actions for Germany's relationship with Europe? Acting against the U.S. in this way had consequences for the other important relationship, the other important opportunity that existed in this historic moment.

Well, you threw the word "Realist" in, at which point we should both pause and give praise to our teacher, Ken Waltz.

That's right.

The greatest Realist of all times.

That's right, and who just appeared on this program.

So let's have a little paean to our teacher, Ken Waltz. As Realists, we have to analyze the situation by transcending, as I said just a few minutes ago, both personality and politics ideology. We have to look at how the structure of power in the world has changed.

I think what we've seen in the last several months was the attempt, maybe the birth or attempt at birth, if I may use that strange neologism, of the new international system. Bipolarity was lost; unipolarity with America on top of the power remained, as the term "last remaining superpower" indicates. What we now see is the attempt at restoring or recreating a more multi-polar system, at least a system where excessive American power is balanced by the others.

To put it in more journalistic terms, it's the attempt by the lesser nations to put the ropes back on Gulliver. And what we saw in the run-up to the Iraqi war and throughout part of it was the attempt on the part of two once very close allies, France and Germany, to stage what diplomatic studies call "the reversal of alliance." Since we don't study diplomatic history anymore, reversal of alliance is not a very familiar term, but it indicates how previous allies gang up with previous enemies to form a new alliance or a new counterweight to their former allies.

So you have this, at least in nature, at least in ritualistic terms as opposed to real terms, the attempt by Paris, Berlin, and Moscow to form an "axis" against the last remaining superpower. The axis revolved around the attempt to stop the American war against Iraq, which these lesser powers saw as an unacceptable attempt to exert American power in the most critical, strategic region in the world.

So this is how I would analyze the stage. Or, let's put it this way. There's a new stage: old actors aligning in new ways.

Next page: Consequences for Europe

See also the Kenneth Waltz interview, "Theory and International Politics" (2003)