Dear Gerd,
We first met when I shared your car in the last days of your campaign for re-election in Lower Saxony in 1998, a few months before you led the Red-Green coalition to victory in the national elections. I had heard you speak before at SPD congresses but what struck me on that day of campaigning was the way you could connect to the fears and needs of ordinary German voters. For me, as a European social democrat, your election as chancellor a few months later meant the possibility of establishing a network of reformist, modernising party leaderships in Europe. You, Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin and Romano Prodi commanding the four biggest European economies. In the US, a friendly president, Bill Clinton. In the Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Greece and Austria, the left were in charge.
What went wrong? Today only Tony Blair is left of that big four. Sometimes I read in the German or the French press criticisms of the Anglo-Saxon model. I rub my eyes in disbelief. In my constituency, a classic industrial town where coal was dug up from the ground and steel was melted in giant furnaces, the Labour government has added jobs, schools, doctors, policemen, rights for trade unions and has fulfilled the first task of social democracy, which is to provide work for the workers. Since Tony Blair became prime minister, there are 2.3m more jobs in the British labour market. Imagine if German unemployment was under 2m and falling. You would still be chancellor.
Instead, we have a Europe with Germany at its heart where there is a lack of confidence and optimism. It is a Europe where people know only how to say no. No to Brussels. No to the European constitution. No to reform of the European budget.
I remember when we talked seven years ago how keen you were on building a triangular relationship with London as well as Paris. This would have required a dramatic remodelling of how Europe was run. In the book you wrote before the federal campaign of September 1998, you said the axis between Germany and France should become a triangle between our three countries.
But when I asked you what you knew about other European leaders and you shrugged your shoulders and said, "Europe, that I leave to Oskar and the Tuscan left," I think I knew what you meant. There is a Europe that has been colonised by a narrow elite that speaks the foreign languages and understands the sensibility of other countries, and which uses a private dialect from which ordinary national politicians are excluded. The high priests of Europe have now been brought down to earth by the French and Dutch rejection of the constitution. Perhaps if we had built that London-Paris-Berlin triangle — instead of the twin axes of Berlin and Paris and Berlin and Moscow — that mess could have been avoided.
You were not helped, of course, by the unforgivable behaviour of Oskar Lafontaine. No social democratic party can be a one-man band. Tony Blair has had the indispensable help of Gordon Brown, arguably the most successful economic and finance minister in British political history, just as Willy Brandt could always rely on Herbert Wehner. I thought Oskar's unnecessary and foolish resignation left the SPD without its own axis of two major figures, with many rivalries and differences between them, but both jointly dedicated to the success of progressive politics in Germany and Europe.
The tragedy of the Weimar Republic was the ideological vanity of those who created the USPD and the other factional parties that tore apart German social democracy. Oskar is a middle-aged man in a hurry and he did profound damage to the cause of social democracy in Europe for which history will never forgive him.
A social democratic party without an enduring strong link to trade unions has no agency amongst its voters other than state and municipal bureaucracies. As a lifelong co-worker with trade unions I am still at a loss to understand the catastrophic failure of Europe's strongest trade union movement to support you as chancellor. In factories up and down the country the trade unions cut deals which reduced the purchasing power of their members but which have saved the most advanced and export capable parts of European industry. But in every other area where reform was needed, German trade unions opted for a populist rejectionist politics.
As a result, a thousand dues-paying members of the DGB (Germany's TUC) have quit a union every working day in recent years. Soon German trade unions will be no stronger than their American counterparts, which are known as "bookend unions" because they have members on the east and west coasts but nothing in between.
And all the time you had to do battle with Christian Democracy. Chancellor Kohl left you more than 4m unemployed in 1998. Germany had refused every necessary reform between 1990 and 1998, and your friends in London looked with dismay at the behaviour of conservatives in the Bundesrat and the state governments who blocked every attempt to open up the labour market. I wish Angela Merkel and the CDU-SPD coalition well. But if Germany is to succeed in tackling its low growth and high unemployment, it will do so on the basis of your ideas and proposals.
Tony Blair tried hard to work with you. You remember the private dinners and meetings? I remember you coming to brunch at Downing Street before I showed you, Doris and Klara around the House of Commons. I was amazed at your detailed knowledge of British parliamentary history—I think you could give a seminar on the causes of the English civil war. In the empty chamber of the Commons you stood at the despatch box like a British prime minister.
If I had had a camera I could have sold the picture for €10m to the German-hating press in England. I can only regret the constant hostility from the right-wing press to enduring partnership with Germany. But please, Gerd, these stupid headlines and ugly articles do not represent the British people. Everyone I know who visits Germany for tourism, culture, business or education comes back a friend of the country and its people. I would meet Joschka Fischer in different capitals and he would quote to me what had been published in the Sun the day before. But in Britain the Sun is used to wrap up fish and chips. Like the Bild-Zeitung its headlines are exciting and dramatic but like a Chinese meal nobody can remember what was in it an hour or two after consuming it.
The Iraq war was, of course, a blow for all of us who wanted to see Europe grow in unity. You changed the German constitution, on the use of German troops, in a way that no one would have believed possible when you were elected chancellor. With your support, Tony Blair was able to persuade Bill Clinton that with or without a UN resolution the democracies had to intervene to stop butchery, terror and tyranny in Kosovo.
I remember watching on television as the first units of a German brigade crossed from Macedonia into Kosovo. There stood an angry armed group of Serb soldiers with their guns ready to fire. A German officer without even a personal weapon in his hand went up and calmly pushed the rifle of the leading Serb to one side. It was an act of bravery that did great honour to the profession of arms and showed that German troops were back where they belonged, fighting to defeat terror and tyranny. Today, German soldiers man the thin line of democratic defence against the new totalitarianism of jihadi fundamentalism in different parts of the world.
I have always defended the rights of France and Germany not to take part in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But equally I think I have the right to ask that when the House of Commons after long and difficult debates votes with a large majority to support the commitment of British soldiers against tyranny that decision too should be respected. You said to me in Brussels, in the middle of the conflict, that Tony Blair always followed policies dictated by Rupert Murdoch. That is not true. Murdoch always supports whoever wins in politics. In Australia he has supported Labour prime ministers when they were winning and then when they were losing he switched to right-wing prime ministers. The one ideological playing field in which Murdoch has been consistent is relentless hostility to the EU. Yet he faces in Blair the most pro-European PM since Ted Heath. Here, alas, the connection between Berlin and London did not get the investment it deserved to promote a progressive and reform-oriented EU.
Three conditions are necessary for this. Firstly, Europe must become a job-creating zone in the world. Secondly, its budget requires reform so that no longer nearly half of it is used to promote protectionist agricultural policies that increase poverty in the third world. And the third is to have a Europe which accepts that the European institutions are not there to replace or supersede national traditions, national cultures, national parliaments and national governments but to work co-operatively with them to good effect.
Europe now faces an invasion by the hungry and poor of the world whose chances of developing an economic future in their own countries are impossible because of the protectionist cartels that control the EU budget. Every cow in Europe enjoys a subsidy of two euros a day when there are more than 1bn people in the world living on less than half that. But the impression in London is that instead of working collaboratively for progressive reform of this lopsided budget, you were ready to do exclusive bilateral deals with Paris that were then offered as a fait accompli to all the other European nation states.
At the same time, Joschka Fischer was giving the last breath to a romantic idealised vision of Europe that the 1968 generation had held dear. He set it out in his speech to Humboldt University in Berlin in 2000. The speech was romantic, visionary, and its solution to the European question was, essentially: all power to Brussels.
But Europe is located in the hard material reality of economics and the cold political necessity of governing complex and difficult nations, each with its own calendar of elections and highly specific political culture. Europe is not a beautiful design which a genius political architect can impose. It is a messy organic process of permanent growth and change, and requires the skills of a great gardener rather than the static formulae of an architect or engineer. So Europe went down the blind alley of seeking a constitution as if the gentlemen of Brussels were the same as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
Now you have a unique chance to make European history. You are young and fit and have seen all of the mistakes that Europe has made from the inside. Europe has need of the kind of statecraft that led you to the important changes in the German constitution. And I hope you will take the time to write a serious book about what Europe needs to do.
It can never be easy to see the leader of the opposition party move into your office. But I refuse the fashionable pessimism about Germany's future. Your leadership on the issue of Turkey will always be noted by historians in contrast to the xenophobic comments from Vienna and Paris. Together with Green ministers you introduced many small reforms and improvements in the German way of life that showed different politics and new possibilities in contrast to the conformist stasis of the regime you took over from.
As a British citizen, let me thank you for your seven years of service to the people of Germany and to the great causes of strengthening Europe, widening it to include all of your neighbours and to putting German soldiers at the service of democracy. Germany will soon be back on its feet. You do not have to accept any "Anglo-Saxon" ideas that you don't like. But as a fellow social democrat, I can tell you that watching the citizens of my constituency in work, paying taxes to improve public services and feeling that they are in a growing confident country, is a good feeling to have.
All best wishes to you, Doris, Klara and little Viktoria.
Your friend, Denis
