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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A French-German debate
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Still paying the price for its defeat in World War II, Germany has neither veto rights nor a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. However, economically speaking Germany is the most powerful state in Europe and one of the most powerful in the world, and it is anomalous that its position in the international organisation does not reflect the status it has earned on the international stage, especially in a new and different world marked not only by the globalisation process, but also, particularly for the European states, by the emergence of a united Europe.
In the eyes of many, Germany has succeeded in carving for itself a dominant position through its economy, a feat Hitler failed to achieve through military means. In that sense, it is no longer a defeated nation. However, this raises new fears of German hegemony, not only among Europeans but within Germany itself. These fears contributed in no small measure to the creation of the European Union, an institution meant to absorb any expansionist tendencies Germany might still be harbouring and deprive it of the belligerency that has generated two world wars in the twentieth century.
One of the key issues for the European continent is the relationship between Germany and France. Emerging on the winning side in both world wars, France stands as a counter pole to Germany's preponderant status. Thus stability in Europe depends largely on the solidity of Franco-German relations, which in the past were marked by recurrent wars, actually three in less than a century, from 1870 to 1945.
However, there are some differences between the French and German visions of Europe's institutional future. Last month, these differences sparked a lively debate between two prominent intellectuals, one German, one French, who both presently hold ministerial posts: Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and head of its Green Party, and Jean-Pieree Chevenement, France's interior minister and a former leading figure in the French Socialist Party who quit the party in protest against the Maastricht treaty and because of his opposition to Europe's unified currency, the Euro.
Fischer, who envisages a European Union with a functioning government on a federalist model in the next decade, and who describes himself as an all-out "integrationist" responded to Chevenement's criticism of his proposal by accusing the French interior minister of "sovereignism," a term denoting over-concern with national sovereignty at the expense of European unity and the sacrifices it entails on state sovereignty.
In the face-to-face debate, transcripts of which were published simultaneously in Germany's Die Zeit and France's Le Monde, Chevenement insisted that, within the boundaries of the European Union and the rules of globalisation, it is imperative to retain a given amount of state sovereignty, because Germany is still bedeviled by its history and has not solved all its problems yet. As to France, it is at peace with its own past, because it was the French Revolution which launched the values that now stand at the basis of contemporary civilisation. Germany, on the other hand, has only recently become a unified nation-state, at a time when the drive for European unification requires member states to go beyond the notion of absolute sovereignty.
Chevenement pointed out that, contrary to the German tradition, a modern nation is the sum total of its citizens. It has to satisfy their ability to think together about their future with no discrimination. Citizens do not derive their rights only from their belonging to a given land or a given blood, because, if so, citizenship would be based on ethnicity. This can easily slide into racism, a development that actually occurred in Germany. France was able to avoid that deviation thanks to the French Revolution and the principles consecrated in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Revolution sanctioned the notion of citizenship. According to Chevenement, the "integrationism" Fischer calls for is in fact an attempt to move beyond nationalism and replace it with a Utopian vision that he calls "federalism".
In Chevenement's view, the differences between the two nations go back to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the 1848 Revolution which spread throughout Europe and was defeated in Germany, thus subjecting the bourgeoisie to the hegemony of the aristocracy and the military elites. This brought about the abortion of the bourgeois revolution and the creation of an imperial regime which launched World War I. Germany's defeat in the war and the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty provoked widespread indignation throughout Germany and a growing desire for revenge. This mood provided a fertile breeding ground for Nazism and for the creation of camps of mass genocide like Auschwitz and other concentration camps which are part and parcel of Germany's reunification in 1989. Reunification overcame the complexes that have bedeviled Germany and reached their climax with Nazism.
Fischer recognises that Germans must assume responsibility for Hitler's extermination camps as part of their historical legacy. This is necessary of Germany is to liberate itself from that negative legacy. The German nation is no longer divided into two parts. 1989 is the expression of Germany's liberation, the point at which it moved beyond the reasons which have generated its complexes and its deviations from sound historical development. Today Germany is in a position to contribute in a healthy way to building up in Europe a super-entity capable of coping with the United States and eventually other mergers that could rise in Asia, the Far East or elsewhere. Europe should no longer accept subordination to any specific superpower; it should be a partner to and not a protectorate of the United States. Also, Europe has no interest in seeing Russia destabilised. The stability of Russia is a prerequisite for the stability of Europe, whether regarded as a whole, or in terms of the problems of each state taken separately.
It is worth noting that France refused to sign the Warsaw Declaration that a hundred states which attribute themselves to the principles of democracy endorsed at the end of a conference held in Poland this week. French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine declared that democracy is a process, in perpetual development, with characteristics specific for each democratic experiment taken separately. Its features have to emanate from below and cannot be imposed from above, even if it is a democratic state like the USA that stands behind the statement. Attempts at formalising democracy have had negative rather than positive results, as demonstrated by the counter-effects of putting pressure on leaders such as Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein or even on the Islamic Republic of Iran under Khomeini.
Chevenement's debate with Fischer prompted French President Chirac to express a limited, middle-term vision of Europe's future that was distinct from those expressed by both interlocutors. While not wholly endorsing Fischer's proposal for a federal Europe, he did not reject it as bluntly as Chevenement did. In an address to the German Bundestag in Berlin, he proposed that eventually a European constitution could be put in place by a number of European "pioneer" states, without entering into too much detail concerning a European government, a European parliament, or even a European president. He made it clear he was not calling for a European superstate that would substitute for Europe's nation-states.
For such developments to materialise, politics must take precedence over institution-building. Actually, the Fischer-Chevenement debate did not only cast light on Europe's problems, but on the mechanisms governing conflict-resolution anywhere in our contemporary world, including, for instance, conflicts in the Middle East. Indeed, there are many parallels between Germany and Israel when it comes to how their environment perceives them. Both are seen as expansionist, belligerent states that have been responsible for devastating wars in their respective regions. The European Union is an attempt by the peoples of Europe (by France, in particular, thanks to the Schuman-Monnet project) to build a unified Europe capable of overcoming the threat of a third world war. Both Europe and the Middle East come up against similar challenges that in both cases have to be confronted and cannot be dismissed.
