Joschka's journey

This ambitious book was to have been part of Joschka Fischer's application for a senior job on the international stage. It is widely known that Fischer was interested in becoming European foreign minister and only reluctantly agreed to contest one last election with Gerhard Schröder. Things have not gone according to plan. At the time of writing, it is anybody's guess whether there will be a European foreign minister at all before Fischer's retirement, and he may lose his current job, German foreign minister, in the upcoming German election. But the book still has plenty to teach us about the foreign policy dilemmas of the German left.

Fischer is an autodidact. He famously organised seminars with Jürgen Habermas in the back of the Greek restaurant Dionysos in Frankfurt in the mid-1980s, and he knows German thinkers like Theodor Adorno inside-out. Although he never got a degree, Fischer seems to be the only senior German politician who writes his own books (with the possible exception of Oskar Lafontaine).

Fischer's intellectual ambitions are a constant provocation to German professors of international relations, who rarely miss an opportunity to put the foreign minister in his place. His long quotations, many have told him, show that Fischer remains too impressed by the academic learning he never had. Worse still, his prime adversaries—as well as the sources of his own thinking—are almost all American. Kant and Hobbes make an appearance, but, closer to the present, the protagonists turn out to be the neoconservative Robert Kagan and Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian who stressed the tragic dimension of international relations.

The primary purpose of Fischer's book is an appeal for the west to hang together. In his eyes, the west faces a great new strategic challenge: "jihadist terrorism," or what Fischer terms a "third totalitarianism." He is aware that the differences are legion between al Qaeda on the one hand and Nazism and Stalinism on the other, the most obvious being that the latter had powerful states at their disposal. Yet he insists that both in their aims (global domination), and their methods (indiscriminate killings), jihadists and 20th-century totalitarians show more similarities than differences.

In his analysis he follows not only historians like Yehuda Bauer, but also fellow '68ers such as the American Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. Like Berman, Fischer is seeking a coherent story for the '68ers to tell about themselves. That story began with a battle against the remnants of Nazism in the 1960s, while today the "lessons" of the 20th century, and German history in particular, are applied in fighting Bin Laden. The major step in between is the Kosovo war—the defining foreign policy event of the red-green government—which Fischer and other Greens explicitly justified with the argument that history had taught "never again genocide," as opposed to the pacifist fallacy of "never again war." (See Hans Kundnani, Prospect, August 2005.)

Consequently, Fischer's combative left-liberalism is much less sceptical about the idea of a "war on terror" than might be expected. For him, combating jihadist Islam is not only a matter of international police work, but also a strategic challenge. Fischer can then also claim that in combating terrorism, realism and morality coincide—a coincidence which is vital to carry the Greens with him.

What does the great common project for the west look like? Put simply, it is what Fischer calls the modernisation of the middle east and the wider Krisengürtel ("crisis belt"), stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. The third totalitarianism, as it turns out, is a more or less direct consequence of the "crisis of modernisation." Unfortunately, Fischer does not tell the west how it can help bring about this modernisation. What is remarkable, however, is how close Fischer is to American neoconservatives in his desire to hurry along what he calls the "great transformation." The Green strategist retains a staunch belief, perhaps partly derived from Habermas, that all societies have to undergo the same stages of modernisation and even rationalisation. And modernisation is an all-or-nothing package: you cannot adopt the market without eventually having to introduce democracy and rights.

What separates Fischer from at least some neocons is his defence of international law. He points out that Robert Kagan is the real "old" European, a Hobbesian who believes in the all-powerful nation state, pursuing its interests on the international stage, free of legal and moral constraints. Fischer claims that Europeans are not from Venus, but are the survivors of Mars, who have learned that true realism consists in going beyond Hobbes towards a Kantian "perpetual peace"—as evidenced by the EU. Europe, now defined as anti-imperial and anti-hegemonic, turns out to be today's better America.

Thus Fischer can also declare the neocons to be essentially un-American. The founding ideals of the US, according to him, contradict the idea of empire, and America's best liberal traditions will lead it to recover a faith in international law. If nothing else, he argues, Americans will eventually learn the lesson that even "liberal empires" always provoke revolutionary backlashes.

Fischer writes as if a "red-state" nationalist America simply did not exist. And it is ironic that the last gut-level Atlanticists, those who really believe in liberal America, are members of the generation that protested against the Vietnam war. But it reminds us that Fischer—unlike Schröder—does not play "the anti-American card." The US is central to Fischer's worldview; Britain and even France barely feature.

What role and shape then for Europe in alliance with a US that has rediscovered its true nature? Here Fischer shows the results of an unsentimental education in political realism. Yes, the future does lie with close co-operation among states, reforming the UN and enlarging the role of international law. But dreams of a federal Europe have largely been abandoned, and there is not even so much as a hint of an obituary for the nation state. One of the great virtues of the EU, according to Fischer, is that it respects the identities of its member states. All of this is a far cry from Fischer's Humboldt speech in 2000, let alone Habermas's vision of Europe as a "state of nation states" defined in opposition to the US. It is also a far cry from the typically Green enthusiasm for NGOs and global civil society.

Fischer does insist that European political integration must be completed, but he does not reveal much about his own conception of finalité, spending much more time on making the case for Turkish (and Balkan) entry into the EU. These priorities do make sense against the background of Fischer's global vision and the strategic dangers emanating from the "crisis belt" in particular. But thereby Fischer explicitly dismisses another Habermasian hope: Kerneuropa.

The book often has a didactic tone that no doubt has further enraged the Herren Professoren. But re-educating his party in political realism has been one of Fischer's main jobs for more than a decade. In the meantime, it is Schröder who has determined German foreign policy. His hearty political friendship with Putin; the Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Beijing axis; the aggressive pursuit of German economic interests, for instance by trying to lift sanctions on China—these policies are barely mentioned by Fischer. Perhaps there is nothing apart from global strategy that now interests him—not even German foreign policy.