Two-and-a-half years ago, the German Green Party went through a tortured internal debate over whether to endorse German participation in the Kosovo war. For many Greens, especially veterans of the antinuclear campaigns of the 1970s, the thought of supporting militarism, on no matter how small a scale, was acutely painful. But throughout the Kosovo quarrel, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer -- by far the country's most prominent Green -- passionately argued that the doves' concerns were misplaced. Precisely because of its criminal past, Fischer said, Germany had a moral responsibility to help defeat ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. At the climax of these feuds, during a party meeting in May of 1999, an antiwar activist splattered Fischer's head with a red paint balloon.
No such spectacle marked the Greens' national conference in late November, in the eastern city of Rostock, where the party met to conduct an even more difficult argument -- this time, over German participation in the war in Afghanistan. Here the stakes are far higher than in Kosovo: The definition of the war is open-ended, and it will bring German troops outside Europe for the first time since 1945. And this time around, the Social Democratic Party -- with whom the Greens have served in a coalition government since late 1998 -- has not made things easy for the Greens. In early November, eight of the 47 Green members of the Bundestag announced that they would vote against German participation in the war. But by tying the vote on German military aid to a general vote of confidence -- and thus threatening the dissolution of the government -- Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder successfully pressured four of the eight doves to change their votes. The reversal was widely jeered by the press. When the party gathered in Rostock a week after Schröder's gambit, all of its leaders, hawks and doves alike, were probably feeling a bit like Fischer did on the Day of the Paint Balloons: ambushed, unhorsed, and slightly disoriented.
The military aid package that has provoked all this tumult is quite small. Germany has offered Washington 100 special forces soldiers, some medical evacuation units, and 30 special reconnaissance vehicles that can detect nuclear or chemical weapons, for a total of 3900 personnel. "Americans must think this is crazy, getting so worked up over this," says Thomas Risse, a professor of international politics at the Free University of Berlin. "In the grand scheme of things, it's such a tiny level of military support."
But the size of the force matters little when principle is at stake. To the Green doves -- the most prominent of whom is Bundestag member Christian Ströbele -- the Afghanistan war will almost certainly result in famine and humanitarian catastrophe. The hawks, led by Fischer, reply that, whatever its faults, the war is necessary in order to prevent an apocalyptic escalation of terrorism.
On the surface, these arguments parallel the U.S. left's own recent debates. But the German Greens' discussions also carry a sub-theme: How -- if at all -- can European nations influence the way the United States conducts the war? When asked whether he's optimistic that Washington will listen to Germany's concerns about cluster bombs and similar issues, Ströbele answered with a curt "No." In his view, the Pentagon will ultimately do whatever it wants, with or without 3900 German personnel in its coalition.
But a large majority of the Green leadership disagrees. "In the first days after September 11, we were afraid that Bush would bomb everything everywhere, like a cowboy from Texas," says Hans-Josef Fell, a Green member of the Bundestag. "We've been pleasantly surprised that he has taken the time to form a coalition." Fell and other Greens hope that the dynamic of the coalition will restrain any cowboy impulses Washington might have about, say, expanding hostilities to Iraq. As Fischer told the Bundestag on November 8, "The United States must never again be allowed to fall into unilateralism."
"I'm sure Fischer would privately say that some of the American war actions are very problematic," says Hans-Joachim Giegel, a professor of sociology at the University of Jena and a longtime observer of the Greens. "But complaining about them is not the point. The point is to try to use this opportunity to bind the United States into multilateral frameworks -- so that when we revisit the Kyoto accords, or the International Criminal Court, Washington will see that this is not a one-way street. Now, there's a real danger that Fischer is wrong about this -- but to reject this military alliance would definitely create a split between the U.S. and Europe."
At Rostock, the Green leadership took pains to reunify the party. A compromise resolution, approved by nearly 80 percent of the delegates, declared that the party "accepts" (rather than "endorses," as a more hawkish resolution had it) the Bundestag vote for German military aid. The resolution offers "critical solidarity" to the war effort, and notes, awkwardly, that "four Green members of the Bundestag voted against the military package, but more than four members shared their view."
Complicating all of this is the looming German federal election scheduled for September 2002, in which the party is intensely concerned with reminding voters that its politics are still distinct from those of the Social Democrats. This has become more difficult as the Greens have drifted toward the center and as the SPD has begun to pay serious attention to gender and environmental issues. Since joining the federal government coalition in 1998, the Greens have had a miserable run in local and regional elections they've lost voters in 16 out of 16 contests, mostly to the SPD. They currently hover at around 7 percent in national polls; if they gather less than 5 percent of the federal vote next year, according to German rules, they'll win no Bundestag seats at all.
In a poll released on November 15 by the ZDF television network, only 42 percent of Green voters said that they supported German participation in the war. One day later, over 90 percent of the Green members of the Bundestag voted for the military package. The gap between the grassroots and the leadership probably isn't as severe as these numbers suggest, but the underlying problem is real. Michel Golibrzuch, a Green member of the state parliament in Lower Saxony, says that the party's greatest challenge is that "our own base mistrusts its parliamentary representatives."
"Critical solidarity" with the war seems like the appropriate stance -- and, for a party so steeped in pacifism, a courageous one to have reached. It's less clear, however, that the Greens' public rationale -- that new coalitions in the military sphere will lead to new coalitions on environmental and economic policy -- is really plausible. "It is important to say that the German Green Party supports America in this war," says Fell. "We do. But we also want to tell America: Use this occasion to rethink your policies around the world. Don't only arrange the WTO or the Kyoto talks to your own advantage." Is this equation actually taken seriously by anyone in the Bush administration? If, in a year or two, it seems clear that Washington is ignoring (or laughing at) voices like Fell's, the German Greens may be in for a new round of turmoil.
