Tag Archives: Germany

The Greens and Die Gr?nen

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Via Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, an interesting article by Matthew Tempest in Spiegel Online (in English) comparing the rather contrasting fortunes of the German and British Green Parties. Both were founded at around the same time (the article does make an error in saying the Ecology Party renamed itself as the Green Party in the 70s – the change didn’t take place until the 80s, partly to link in with the increased use of the name Green across Europe and the rest of the world) but while the German party is now part of the Government with a number of representatives in the Bundestag, the British Party (or parties, given that the Scottish and Northern Ireland Green Parties now organise separately from the England and Wales Party) still seems some way from a breakthrough into Parliament, let alone government.

The article highlights two main reasons for the different levels of success achieved by the two parties – firstly, and most obviously, the different electoral systems in Britain and Germany and secondly, the way internal divisions were resolved in the two parties. Where the realists (‘realos’) won the internal party debates in Germany, the fundamentalists (‘fundis’) won in Britain, preventing the move towards mainstream politics that benefited the German party.
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Turkey and the EU: Poles apart?

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Like most numbers of the Spectator, the festive, XL-sized holiday edition is marred by the presence of Mark Steyn. But don’t let that put you off, there’s some good stuff there as well. And one of the better bits is an essay by Prof. Norman Stone on Turkey (Potential EU Accession of) (reg. req.).

For the most part Stone paints a picture of the old Ottoman Empire as something much less uniformly Islamic than some think. You should already be aware, of course, that what would later (in truncated form) become Turkey was a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious state, but if you weren’t, Stone gives you a quick background. (By the time it fell apart, the Ottoman Empire had become the ‘Sick Man of Europe’; but for centuries it was a success.) What you might not have known, though, was that the orthodox Christians of the Ottoman realms were only too happy to be part of a nominally Islamic polity. The orthodox patriarchs and the Muslim sultans saw in the latinate West a common foe. Indeed my own suspicion is that the Greeks felt a keener enmity than the Turks. The sultan, understandably, might well have seen the theological differences between orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as obscure and uninteresting (how many of us in the post-Christian lands of the west are aware of, let alone take much interest in, the distinctions between the theravada and mahayana strains of Buddhism?) To the bishops of the orthodox world, though, the sultan served (whether he cared about this or not) as a bulwark against the centralising domination of their brother-bishop at Rome.

But what set Stone off was a recent article in Die Zeit by Prof. Hans-Ulrich Wehler. The title of Wehler’s article, which formed part of the contra side in a Zeit-sponsored debate on Turkish accession to the EU, has some unfortunate historical echoes: “Das T?rkenproblem“.
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Torture does not pay

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As you consider the ongoing saga of US treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere, spare a thought for Wolfgang Daschner. As I wrote in an earlier post, Daschner, Frankfurt’s former deputy police commissioner, faced trial for threatening one Magnus G?fgen with torture. G?fgen had kidnapped young Jakob von Metzler, and the police were trying desperately to find the boy. What they didn’t know at the time was that G?fgen had murdered him very shortly after the abduction and disposed of his body in a lake.

Daschner struck me as a model of the “well-meaning torturer”. He couldn’t have known that Metzler was already dead, and was frantic to find him. But when G?fgen kept shtum, Daschner decided to use torture as an ultima ratio. Well, he didn’t actually use it; but he threatened it, and that was enough both to make G?fgen talk and to make Daschner face criminal charges. In my earlier post, I had said that, if the court found Daschner guilty,

he should be punished. I would hope that the court, in meting out a punishment, would take into account the inhumanly impossible position Daschner found himself in (and the Criminal Code does allow for significantly milder penalties for criminal coercion than a three-year prison term)…. But I cannot accept that his deed be dismissed … because he was acting in good faith and sought to achieve a desirable result.

As the S?ddeutsche reports (in German, alas), the State Court in Frankfurt has now found Daschner guilty. His punishment, though, is mild indeed.
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Halfway There

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This spring, the German newspaper whose web site isn?t quite as bad as another?s began publishing a series of 50 Great Novels from the Twentieth Century. It?s an admirable project in many ways — not least a cover price of EUR 4.90 per hardback. Thirty-seven books have been published so far, and I?ve now read about half of the whole list. Which is as good a point as any for taking stock.

I haven?t quite read 25 of the 50, but let?s face it, with Deutschstunde (German Hour, Siegfried Lenz, no. 28) clocking in at nearly 800 pages, and hefty volumes such as Jorge Semprun?s What a Beautiful Sunday! (Was f?r einen sch?nen Sonntag, no. 17) and Juan C. Onetti?s The Short Life (Das kurze Leben, no. 11), it?s going to be quite a while before I manage all of them.
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Agenda 2020.

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New Europe?Late Thursday night, the European Council approved, as widely expected, the Commission’s recommendation to open membership negotiations with Turkey, largely without imposing additional conditions to be met prior to the beginning of the talks on October 3, 2005. “The time to start negotiations with Turkey has come,” Commission President Jos? Manuel Barroso said. Council President, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, will discuss the EU proposals Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, over breakfast on Friday.
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Orange in Berlin (II)

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The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) and the German-Ukrainian Forum hosted a day-long seminar on the Ukrainian election on December 6 at the Ebert Fondation?s home in Berlin.

Speakers included the leader of the OSCE election observation mission, the director of the school of political analysis at the National University in Kiev, members of the European and German Parliaments, and an expert from Ukraine?s Center for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy.

The background papers for the conference are now online at the CAP’s web site here. There is also a brief conference report (in German) on the same web site here. If a longer report becomes available, we will let you know.,

Not Everybody Likes Orange

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Or the idea that while Russia can bring hundreds of millions of goodies for Kuchma and Yanukovych, the European Union, Poland and other countries to the west have things to offer too.

One publication from Ukraine sees the conference we mentioned as evidence that Germany has been plotting a coup in Kiev. (The URL in the article takes me to a binary stream that I didn’t trust; maybe someone else can enlighten us on what temnik.com.ua is all about.) It doesn’t look like the authors — who considered the fall of Milosevic a coup, too — have discovered Fistful yet.

Anyway, below the fold is a taste of how the other side thinks. (Thanks to the Ukraine List for the translation.)
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New Trouble Ahead?

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While the German Chancellor is – contrary to earlier reports – apparently planning to visit the US President even before his second inauguration in January, a US human rights group, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, is about to disturb the two governments’ reconciliation efforts.

According to a report by the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau (quoted by The Raw Story, Reuters), the American activists will file war crimes charges in Germany against senior U.S. administration officials – including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet – for their alleged responsibility for crimes committed in the Abu Ghraib prison.

Despite claims by the group that “German law in this area is leading the world” – because it allows war criminals to be prosecuted in Germany regardless of where the crime was committed or the defendant’s nationality – whether the German Federal Prosecutor will actually investigate will depend upon the evidence provided. Their German lawyer, Wolfgang Kaleck, seems not overly confident in this respect, stating that he hopes that “the Federal Prosecutor?s Office takes [the] affair seriously.”

However, the case will certainly not be dismissed for political reasons – and thus the Chancellor may actually have to hold another embarrassing meeting with the American President in January. The media, however, is certain to take the issue seriously when details of the case will be presented at news conferences today.
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Orange in Berlin

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Not just orange, but all the colors of the Ukrainian election, analyzed and discussed by top experts.

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Center for Applied Policy Research and the German-Ukrainian Forum are hosting a day-long seminar on the election on Tuesday Monday, December 6 at the Ebert Fondation’s home in Berlin. Logistical details are here (pdf file, in German).

The program was planned even before the first round, so it’s not sheer luck that they’ve got such good people to talk about the events in Ukraine.
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Phonecalls of last resort?

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German Chancellor Schroeder, who is known to have a good personal relation to Russian President Putin, and who, according to news reports”, had told the German Bundestag earlier today that he remains “firmly convinced, firstly that the Russian president wants to develop a democracy [in Russia?!], and wants to do so out of inner conviction”, talked to President Putin on the phone this afternoon. Now, Thomas Steg, deputy press secretary of the German government announced with reference to said conversation “that both Chancellor Schr?der and President Putin agreed that the conflict regarding the outcome of the Ukrainian Presidential elections must be solved legally and that all must be done to avoid any outbreak of violence. It is now of utmost importance for all parties to arrive at a peaceful solution through political negotiations.”

Clearly, given Russia’s general attitude and earlier uncertainty aobut Russian special forces having mobilised in Kiev, the important keywords from President Putin are “peaceful” and “negotiations”.