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Pacifism in the Federal Republic (January 2003)

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One cannot avoid noticing a characteristic West-East difference in this matter. Christian Ströbele’s constituency covers Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, in other words, it’s a district that includes part of both sides of the once-divided Berlin. One side has strong Green Party leanings; the other is more red-red, postsocialist-social democratic. Ströbele’s antimilitarism enjoys great support from both. But in Kreuzberg, among its emancipatory-alternative public, the new Joschka Fischer doctrine of armed humanity has not remained entirely without echo or impact. What about those massacred in Srebrenica or the enslaved women of the Taliban? Couldn’t we, shouldn’t we intervene? On the other hand, of course, the old anti-imperialist certainties also resurface: in reality it’s all about cheap oil, Bush is a man of the military-industrial complex, and so on and so forth.

In Friedrichshain, according to Ströbele, the climate is different. There is a “deep and placid underlying mood” against all violence of war. No aggressive bloc mentality as in the autonomist* scene in the West. But there is no support for military intervention in the service of human rights either. For the most part, the East [here meaning the Eastern part of Germany] doesn’t seem susceptible to the argument that made pacifism increasingly dubious for the West German Left and occasionally the Greens – namely, that freedom and justice can sometimes, in the exceptional case, only be protected or reestablished through use of force; that is, war was necessary to bring the death mills of Auschwitz to a halt.

Still, a widespread difference in perception persists between “police-style” military intervention, which is largely accepted, and “genuine” war between states, which triggers fear and resistance. The distinction is not without reason, but it can definitely fuel a new kind of denial of reality. A consensus is gradually forming that the threat of terrorism, ethnic unrest, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction can only be fought with force and violence. At the same time, the main message is: the way the Pentagon sees it cannot be the way. There is a flood of intelligent commentaries and treatises on the “asymmetrical” nature of today’s conflicts, in which armies are no longer of much use against fanatical lone fighters and shady terrorist networks. Now and then, the chancellor lends his ear to Erhard Eppler, who paints a picture of a global panorama of “privatized violence” of warlords, drug gangs, and religious partisans, in which al Qaeda figures as a kind of multinational enterprise specializing in terror.

There is certainly a good deal of truth to that. But this fixation on “privatized violence” tends to hide the fact that countries can indeed play a role in creating this problem, and not only as failing states in which the collapse of public order allows crime to take root, but also through state sponsorship, whereby terrorism is given an infrastructure. This is where the taboo zone of war begins. People want to move “beyond” the others, the dinosaur-like warhorses of the superpower – perhaps no longer as the avant-garde of nonviolence, which is how many détente-friendly Germans saw themselves in the era of confrontational blocs, but now through deeper insight into the nature of the challenges of the 21st century, which cannot be solved with recipes à la [Donald] Rumsfeld. A certain inclination toward know-it-allness and a selective perception of reality has remained.



* The autonomists [Autonome] represent the most radical part of the political Left. They support anarchist and anarcho-communist ideas, and their tactics are usually militant – trans.

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