Siding With the Likes of India and Brazil
How could this best of the “good European” countries turn its back on France and England, let alone the U.S., and choose to side instead with the likes of Russia and China? ~Russell Berman
At first glance, this is a stupid question. On reflection, it is also insulting.
It is stupid because “good European” countries can and will differ on contentious foreign policy questions. For good or ill, there is not one line on foreign policy that defines a nation as a “good European” nation. That is what pro-war propagandists tried to do in 2002-03 when “old Europe” was identified as the corrupt “bad Europe” in contrast to the new EU and NATO members that were supposedly motivated by principle and idealism to launch an unprovoked invasion of another country. Inevitably, the governments that dissent from the pro-war line are tarred as cowardly or treacherous or some combination of the two. The idea that Germans would be getting lectured because it refused to authorize an attack on another country that had done nothing to them is quite bizarre. In light of modern European and especially German history, the notion that a willingness to start wars (for whatever reason) should be taken as the standard for judging a state worthy of the name “good European” is twisted.
The insult comes in linking a position consistent with support for maintaining international peace to “the likes of Russia and China,” as if the choice is between starting unprovoked wars or imitating authoritarian governments. Germany also chose to stand with “the likes of India and Brazil,” and Poland and Turkey, among others, and yet for some reason critics often forget to mention that all of these democratic governments were firmly against military action in Libya. Their reasons varied, and some of them were acting out of direct self-interest, but we still have many of the more significant democratic governments in the world taking a different position on Libya than the U.S. and a few western European governments.
It’s also worth pointing out that the German government “failed” to support or join in the attack on Libya because it was reacting to very strong public opposition to military action. Germany’s “failure” to support the war was a reflection of what its electorate wanted. Democratists never tire of telling us about the pacific virtues of democratic government, but as soon as any democratic government offers them some supporting evidence for this by refusing to start a war they are scandalized and horrified at how treacherous and weak that government is being. In the end, the Union-FDP coalition’s efforts to appeal to antiwar and anti-nuclear sentiment ahead of state elections proved to be a flop electorally, but there’s no question that the governing coalition would have fared worse had it approved or participated in bombing Libya. Unlike 2002-03, Germany was very circumspect in not denouncing its allies for what they doing, and it went out of its way not to impugn their motives. There was no way Germany was going to be able to participate in the Libyan war, but it did everything else that it could not to get in the way of the states that were intent on war. Instead of respecting Germany’s position, there has been considerable whining about German perfidy in the countries involved in attacking Libya.
4 Responses to “Siding With the Likes of India and Brazil”
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Attacking Germany never gets old. Most of these people think that Germany. because of it’s past, needs to participate in every humanitarian war under the sun. Refusal to do so must mean a regress in naughty nationalism, and we can’t have that.
I see. So instead of taking foreign policy seriously by applying principles like sovereignty, strategic value, just war, and Constitutionality, let’s act like neighborhood gangs and argue about who’s side so and so is on. How can anyone take this nonsense seriously? Fine for football fans. Not fine for foreign policy.
Peace be with you.
No sooner had President Tito of Yugoslavia died than Germany (with, once again, junior partner Austria in tow) began stoking the nationalist ambitions of her World War II Balkan allies, the Albanians, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims, who had overwhelmingly supported her in the 1940s, to the point of supplying SS units, with little popular opposition except from communists. Most Germans scarcely try to deny this, or that Germany sought to re-establish Austrian and German domination of the Balkans (the “Drang nach Sued-Osten”), because Serbs are, quite unlike Jews, the World War II victims and “untermenschen” who can be demonized with impunity. It is a sign of American intellectual (and moral) degradation that those who read pretentious “intellectual” publications which incorporate the word “new” in their title have no conception of Germany’s sordid role in the breakup of Yugoslavia (or of Germany’s World War II role in the Balkans, with the exception of its impact on the region’s Jews) while those who read the Bible prophesy-oriented “Philadelphia Trumpet” would have no trouble comprehending the highly unfortunate role that Germany has played, and continues to play, in the region. Far from being “this best of the ‘good European’ countries,“ Germany remains the old Germany under the skin, and will revert to form whenever the opportunity avails itself. The world would be better off without German unification. Better yet, Germany ought to have been the nation that was broken up in the 1990s. The Germany of many small principalities, after all, contributed something of genuine value to human culture.
Well put. The ideological obsession with democracy as a category of “friend/enemy” completely obscures the substantive pluralism, tolerance, and emphasis on voluntarism and popular sovereignty that democracy is supposed to embody at home.
So long as a country’s loyalty to liberty and popular sovereignty is measured in terms of its willingness to crusade for those ideals abroad rather than uphold them at home, the “democratism” you mention will serve democracy only in the most superficial sense.
As I’ve tried to point out in some of my own writings, the total ignorance of what the principles of democracy and self-determination actually mean to non American or non-Western European democracies, who very much enjoy the principles of sovereignty which enabled their democracies to exist in the first place, seems to indicate that “democratism” now means the unflinching commitment to the expansion of values of human rights, in total ignorance or defiance of the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention and self-determination which made democracy possible in much of its recent converts in the first place.