"La Guerre Est Un Bloc"

When relations between European countries become tense enough, one country will often bring up the other's actions during World War II as a shaming tactic to gain leverage in the argument. To paraphrase Georges Clemenceau, World War II has become its own constituency among European states. By pandering to a given aspect of the war's memory, one can curry favor with voters.

Two examples of this have recently reared the heads. First, in a last-ditch effort to polish his legacy, outgoing Ukrainian president Victor Yuschenko recently named World War II partisan Stepan Bandera a "Hero of Ukraine," one of the state's highest honors. Bandera is a controversial figure in the war, having opportunistically collaborated with the Nazis as the Third Reich prepared to attack the Soviet Union. He is also accused of condoning deportations of Jews and Poles to concentration camps. Supporters maintain that his actions helped lead to the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.

Yushchenko's announcement has provoked criticism from all corners of Europe, including the EU itself, which issued a statement (see clause 19) "deeply deploring" the decision because of Bandera's Nazi collaboration. Nor are all Ukrainians pleased: residents in the Eastern half of the country, which maintains strong sympathies to Russia, burned an effigy of Bandera after the announcement was made. Yushchenko's successor, Victor Yanukovych, will now have to decide whether to let the decision stand and face hostility in the east and from Russia, or reverse it at the expense of support in the more Russo-skeptic west.  

Meanwhile, as the crisis in Greece has unfolded, the issue of reparations owed by Germany has bubbled up to the surface. In a speech this week, the Greek prime minister stated that while he would not negotiate reparations during the present crisis, the issue remained "open" between the two countries. According to Reuters, several interest groups in Greece claim that Germany owes additional reparations over and above the 115 million deutschemarks it paid the country in 1960. The Prime Minister is surely correct in recognizing the folly of bringing up the reparations question at a time when the country needs German financial aid more than ever. But the fact that the reparations question will remain unresolved is a testament to how strongly the war and its legacy still resonate in Europe.

The US has forgiven most of its historical grudges. Japan and Germany are now two of its strongest allies, and Vietnam one of its largest trading partners (though we have thus far refused to pay reparations). While relations with Russia remain cool, the country is no longer Communist. The only real exception is Iran, where the US still refuses to support a diplomatic presence as a result of the 1979 hostage crisis. Yet American officials eagerly await the election of a moderate regime, one that we would in no way hold responsible for that unpleasant event. America has often been accused of lacking historical perspective, but one might argue that the price to pay for such perspective is deep indeed. 

Picking Your Analogies

The fiscal crisis in Greece has proven an excellent test of the moral fiber of the EU, and it now appears that a clutch of wealthier nations, led by Germany, are one way or another going to bail the country out. For those in favor of increased European integration, that is a huge step. Yet it has also revealed where European civil servants stand in the EUs ongoing identity crisis. Consider the analogy made by Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, as quoted by the Times:

After being peppered with questions about Greece on Thursday, Mr. Trichet responded: “I doubt that, in a press conference, Ben Bernanke would have a question on Alaska or Massachusetts.”

It turns out this is bad reporting: the EU is actually legally barred from staging any kind of Federal Reserve-style bailout of an individual European state even if it wanted to. In any event, as the Times goes on to point out, the EU is still a long way from becoming "the United States of Europe" -- the central government is still far too weak.  US states maintained strong regional identities until the end of the Civil War, 75 years after the Constitutional Convention.  The Lisbon Treaty entered into force two months ago. It is going to take many more confidence-building measures like a coordinated, multi-state bailout to build a strong, central European government.

Just How Populist Does Obama Want to Get?

Enough to purchase a list of Wall Street tax evaders from a renegade HSBC employee?  Angela Merkel, facing far less angst at home than Obama, has now declared an interest in availing herself of the list.  The BBC puts the potential yield from for the country at a relatively modest $100m; for the US, it would undoubtedly be far greater.  Sadly, from a political perspective, the odds that the President would order up the list are remote.  Still, the story of how the list surfaced is worth checking out.

Update 2/4: LeMonde now reporting that the Germans stand to recoup "well above" the $100m figure initially quoted.

The Shot Heard 'Round die Welt?

On June 2, 1967, the Shah of Iran arrived in Berlin for an official state visit. A young student, Benno Ohnesorg, had decided to take part in protests organized by West German student unions. The demonstrations began peacefully, but harsh crowd control tactics by the West German police caused a melee. In the confusion, an officer shot Ohnesorg in the back of the head. He was dead an hour later.

The consensus view of the shooting is that it set off a chain reaction that would leave part of Germany's student movement inexorably radicalized. With the officer’s eventual acquittal on murder charges, students came to view West Germany as hopelessly fascistic; any reform would have to come about through violence. At the head of this new extremist bloc were Ulrich Meinhoff and Andreas Baader, who would go on to form the Red Army Faction, responsible for hundreds of kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations.

It has now emerged that the officer in question, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a spy for the Communist-led East German government. The Anglophone press has run wild this story, with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist each proclaiming that, had West German students known that Ohnesorg’s killer was a Stasi agent, the history of post-war Germany would have taken an entirely different course. A former editor of Der Spiegel, quoted in the Times’ story, puts it thusly: “It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East.”

But why should it have mattered whether Kurras was a Communist? No evidence has emerged that the shooting was at all premeditated, which suggests that the GDR, at least at that moment, did not intend to destabilize West Germany. After his acquittal, Kurras was mothballed by the Stasi, which referred to the incident in Kurras’ private file as a "highly regrettable accident."

Even if his identity somehow had been known, it is not as if the students would have rushed to the defense of West Germany. Both East and West Germany were viewed by German youth as reactionary, authoritarian societies. As Ohnesorg's lawyer explains to Der Spiegel: "Naturally the Stasi kept trying to influence the student movement. On the other hand, the '68ers were fairly critical of the German Democratic Republic. The GDR didn't have some sort of heroic status."

According to the facts of the case laid out in the Der Spiegel article, it was the West German police that did everything they could to cover up the shooting: a Norwegian doctor was prevented from giving first aid, and it took an hour for him to arrive at the hospital. The fragment of Ohnesorg's skull containing the bullet was later discarded before it could be analyzed.

While the shooting certainly got the ball rolling, it was merely the first in a series of radicalizing events – the attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke; the passage of the Emergency Laws in May 1968, which gave the state the authority to restrict basic constitutional rights – that caused the movement to turn violent. If it hadn’t been the shooting of Ohnesorg, it is certain that some other incident would have come along as a pretext for the RAF to form.

Revisiting the June 2 incident does serve to highlight an anomaly of American post-war history: that American student groups like SDS, and even the Weather Underground, were able resist turning to extreme acts of violence, while their German counterparts embarked upon a worldwide reign of terror. This, despite the fact that the unrest plaguing the US was arguably more severe than anything Germany was experiencing: the twinned assassinations of two of its most important leaders, National Guardsmen opening fire on innocent civilians, and an unwinnable war halfway around the world. The list of grievances among Germany’s student-radicals, meanwhile, included “a non-consumerist society,” and an end to psychiatry.

Merkel: Europe just wants someone who will listen.

The New York Times interviews the Chancellor ahead of the G20 summit in London, and she makes it clear that she and her European counterparts are ready to move past the last eight years.

“Hopefully," she says, "he leaves Europe in the awareness that he has friends and partners here, that we depend on each other, that we Europeans certainly have our particular experiences and also bring other accents to bear, but that these are not insurmountable obstacles.”

As it turns out, Obama may be the one having to convince at least some Europeans that he knows what he's doing. Last week the Czech Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek, in his capacity as the EU presidency, criticized Obama's economic recovery plan as "a road to hell," singling out his plan for massive deficit spending and the still-extant "Buy American" clause in the stimulus bill.

Then again, Mr. Topolanek's government just collapsed, so a few grains of salt might be in order.

The Areva-Siemens tiff: more bad news for Franco-German relations

Franco-German relations continue to deteriorate.  The latest point of contention involves a legal tiff between French nuclear conglomerate Areva and the German engineering giant Siemens.  In 2000, both companies signed a cooperation agreement for a joint nuclear venture, giving Siemens a 34% stake in the project.  However, one month ago Siemens pulled out of the plan, putting its stake in the nuclear venture up for sale.  It seems that Siemens was frustrated when attempts to increase its stake in the Areva parent company were blocked.  Apparently the French government wants Areva to stay French and perhaps merge with French engineering giant Alstom, a competitor of Siemens.  The Economist did a nice piece on this business.

That's all fairly vanilla stuff.  But what makes the story interesting is that last week Siemens signed a new nuclear deal with the Russian nuclear conglomerate Rosatom.  The French at Areva are less than amused, and they claim that the new agreement violates their 2000 contract with Siemens.

The important point here is that Areva, Siemens, and Rosatom are all at least partially owned by their national governments.  This fact, coupled with the strategic importance of nuclear energy, makes the Areva-Siemens fiasco a fascinating story that mirrors the geopolitical developments we see taking place.  Franco-German relations continue to worsen, while German-Russian business interests are converging more and more...