MOOD RING (via Mike Daley):

Reworking The Union: Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder misjudged the mood in Europe by using their alliance to dominate the EU. Now they're paying the price - diplomatically and electorally. (Collin May, 02 March, 2004, EURSOC)

Sunday’s regional election in Hamburg was a disaster for Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats. The SPD, which once dominated the city, had its worst result since World War 2. The main reason for the party’s bad showing, at least according to many pundits, is Schröder’s national program to reform Germany’s extensive and rather cumbersome social welfare coverage.

There is, however, a larger picture, one which includes Germany’s moribund economic performance and has made Gerhard Schröder an exceedingly unpopular politician. Other elements of this larger picture were played out, in part, over the last two weeks during a summit in Berlin and during a visit by Mr. Schröder to the White House in Washington.

Now, to set the context here, we have to remember that it was not all that long ago that Gerhard Schröder was engaged in an election campaign leading up to a vote he was all but certain to lose. The Audi Chancellor (so-named because he’s had as many marriages as Audi has rings on its trademark) had led Germany into a rather mucky economic bog.

But fate smiled on Schröder, delivering him an issue that would stave off disaster and return the Social Democrats to power by a narrow margin. That issue was good ole anti-Americanism. During the 2002 campaign, with a war in Iraq a looming possibility, Schröder decided to play to the worst in the post-war German mindset. And he did so in the most blatant and childish manner. Rather than simply stating that he would not support a US-led war, he chose to ratchet up the rhetoric, referring to “American adventurism.” But it was his hot-headed Justice Minister who took the mud-slinging to extremes when she compared Bush to Hitler, saying that Bush was attempting to distract attention from America’s ailing economy, just as Hitler had done, by stirring up international crises. Of course no one was supposed to notice the obvious factual inaccuracies in this claim. Hitler’s economy was not ailing when he began his drive to dominate Europe. But even more telling was the fact that it was not George Bush but Gerhard Schröder who was using international affairs to turn attention away from his own inept economic governance. And after all, one would think that 911 could hardly be dismissed as irrelevant to the international affairs of the day.

In any case, Schröder’s buffoonery, had it been limited to Germany and the German election, would have been nothing but a blip on the radar screen, especially as the Justice Minister in question was fired. Unfortunately it began to snowball when France’s Jacques Chirac took the ball and ran with it. Sensing that Schröder might be a useful pawn in his eternal efforts at self-promotion, Chirac used the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Elysee Treaty between France and Germany to express their unified opposition to war in Iraq while waxing poetic about the need for a new form of globalization, one that was gentler and kinder to the developing world.

Chirac now had his ally and the rest would be history. At each stage of the build-up to the Iraq war, the Franco-German lovebirds would seek to undo America’s intentions while carving out a greater space for themselves on the international stage, a space often occupied by Chirac and an assortment of the world’s most notorious dictators shaking hands at the Elysee Palace.

But sadly for the duplicitous duo, they were too clever by half. Chirac, like many in France, thought the world actually was as the anti-globalization crowd was portraying it. They bought into the rhetoric that said that the big bad American hyper-power (along with Israel) was to blame for the sundry problems of the developing world. I suspect that neither Schröder nor Chirac completely believed this at first, but this was the rhetoric they used to justify their opposition to action in Iraq. Eventually, I think they forgot that it was rhetoric and they began to act as if they could build foreign policy on the basis of this specious global portrait.

The faults in the anti-globalization assessment were numerous but they tend to settle around one theme: the passing of the nation-state.

All those Franco-Germans who dream of being important again by dominating the EU from within might do well to consider that CA, FL, TX, NY and a few other American states, each of which would be a powerful nation in its own right, don't actually get to have foreign policies of their own and have, over the centuries, lost much power to the Federal government.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2004 10:02 AM