Memoirs of a political superstar

An unlikely foreign minister still fails to see the implications of his own policy, writes Toby Vogel.

Joschka Fischer is a superstar on the international circuit, a notch below Al, Bill and Tony but no less irresistible to conference organisers, journalists or publishers. The hallmark of a superstar is that the quality of his performance no longer matters to his fans - it is enough for him to show up. This is what Fischer has done with Die rot-grünen Jahre. Deutsche Außenpolitik - vom Kosovo bis zum 11. September (The Red-Green Years: German Foreign Policy from Kosovo to 9/11), published in German last month. He has shown up all right, but little of the charisma and eloquence of the most unlikely man to become German foreign minister is discernible in this book.

That does not mean, however, that Fischer has written a bad book, or a boring one, something he would probably find quite difficult to do. Anyone who is even remotely interested in the events covered here - from NATO’s attack on Serbia to the Middle East peace process or the ups and downs of Germany’s first-ever (and so far only) coalition of Greens and Social Democrats - will find this book an interesting read. A second volume, covering the period from 11 September 2001 to the end of the Red-Green coalition in the fall of 2005, will deal with no less interesting events. Indeed, Fischer oversaw some of Germany’s most transformational foreign policy moments since the reunification, above all the military interventions in Kosovo (without explicit authorisation by the UN Security Council) and Afghanistan (this time with a Security Council mandate). But it is hard to shake off the impression that Fischer was either holding off or simply not all that interested when writing this book.

The treatment of events in Kosovo is symptomatic of this lack of interest. Here is the defining moment in Fischer’s tenure and the centre around which his memoirs revolve - yet Fischer is strangely disengaged and at times even sloppy in his reasoning. This is not about some historical fine print but the main lines of a highly divisive policy of putting the human rights of a persecuted minority ahead of the sovereign rights of a government to defeat a violent insurgency. In Fischer’s reading, this point is reduced to an intra-Green disagreement about which of the bedrock principles of German post-war politics - ‘Never again war’ and ‘Never again genocide’ - should prevail in a situation like Kosovo.

It is not unreasonable for Fischer to dwell on this point; after all, it was a bitter irony that it should be the first-ever Green foreign minister who would have to decide over war or peace. Fischer’s tense relationship with the party grassroots - for the most part an unruly bunch of utopian pacifists - did not help. He writes that he never felt emotionally attached to the nationwide Greens (as opposed to the cliquish Frankfurt group in which Fischer, a former leftist street fighter and big-city cabbie, first honed his political skills). A low point came when opponents of intervention in Kosovo threw a paint bag at him during a party congress, tearing his ear drum. Apparently, they were pacifists only when it came to foreign policy but not in intra-party fights.

But Fischer’s discussion of this fight comes at the expense of any serious argument over the far more controversial question of whether the Kosovo campaign was legitimate in the absence of an explicit authorisation by the Security Council. The reasoning presented here is superficial to the point of being flippant.

Fischer’s memoirs include a few of these blind spots, all of them surprising in light of the undeniable intellectual depth he brought to his job. Referring to the killing of thousands of unarmed men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, Fischer writes: "I could simply no longer avoid the fact that in Bosnia and hence in the Europe of 1995, this concerned the most elementary principles of a humane society." That decision could very easily have been reached three years earlier, when the siege of Sarajevo began, or almost four years earlier, when the Croatian town of Vukovar was levelled by the Yugoslav army. Equally puzzling is Fischer’s policy implication, to continue the protection of UN ‘safe areas’ in Bosnia; it was precisely that policy which had failed in Srebrenica. The US government considered the same facts at the same time as Fischer and reached a very different conclusion: that the UN peacekeepers had to be withdrawn and the Serbs bombed to the negotiating table. That Fischer does not understand this sequence of events more than a decade later is disappointing and symptomatic of the book as a whole.

• Die rot-grünen Jahre. Deutsche Außenpolitik - vom Kosovo bis zum 11. September. By Joschka Fischer. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 448 pages.

An unlikely foreign minister still fails to see the implications of his own policy, writes Toby Vogel.