Meanwhile, in opposition from the left there is the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism, which just scraped over the 5 percent hurdle to get its full complement of members of parliament. While its electorate is still overwhelmingly in the east, it is now setting out to establish itself as a party of the “socialist left” in the whole Federal Republic.
For the time being, however, the coalition’s main problems will be not with the opposition but within its own ranks. For this will be a coalition of coalitions. Schröder may be chancellor, but Oskar Lafontaine is the Social Democrats’ party leader. They appeared together at virtually all the postelection meetings. Some even say, “Lafontaine makes policy and Schröder sells it.” Lafontaine is an opportunist but an opportunist with close ties to the old left. And that old left is much more strongly represented among the Social Democrats than it is in Tony Blair’s purged New Labour. Meanwhile, the Greens remain the most diverse and even chaotic of parties, with a strong pacifist wing.
What of Schröder himself? Though his rugged features are sharply cut, they are the sharpest thing about him. Except, perhaps, his suits. He looks very good on television. Indeed, he seems slightly more real on television than when you meet him in person. He is the epitome of the fifty-something, smooth, flexible, professional politician. But someone who knows him quite well told me that, unlike Clinton or Blair, he does not have any religious attachments (albeit, in the case of Clinton, honored in the breach) or perceptible value system. So he’s a sort of Clinton without the principles.
He has never, this colleague pointed out, taken a courageous independent stand on any issue. In the past, he has embraced left-wing positions (opposing the deployment of NATO’s cruise and Pershing missiles in the early 1980s, for example) and positions more associated with the right—for instance, last year he was suggesting the postponement of European monetary union. In each case, he has gone with the wind. In the public-opinion polls, more of those asked thought he would be a competent chancellor than thought Helmut Kohl would be. But my private opinion polls suggest that a lot of people, including some Social Democrats, share the doubts expressed on a recent Economist cover: “Would you buy a used car from Gerhard Schröder?” The polite word is pragmatist.
The elementary point of this catalog of observations is that the Berlin republic begins with a whole series of unknowns. And a combination of unknowns is a larger unknown. In fact, the Germans have got more than they bargained for. They voted for a change, yes. But there was little of the popular enthusiasm for a new beginning that accompanied Willy Brandt’s appointment as chancellor in 1969, with his famous slogan “Risk More Democracy.” Instead, Schröder actually used the conservative Konrad Adenauer’s motto “No Experiments.” An experiment is what Germany has gotten, all the same.
3
This being so, all predictions are more than usually risky. But let me venture three guesses. My first guess is an optimistic one. It has to do with so-called foreigners living in Germany. The only disturbing element in this campaign was the popular hostility to these “foreigners” that was revealed. This was particularly true in eastern Germany, where one in five young men say they could imagine voting for a party of the far right. On the streets of Berlin, the posters of one of these parties proclaimed, “Criminal Foreigners Out!” The hostility extends not just to blacks and Turks but to the Poles they call “Pollacken.” And it reaches well into the Christian Democrat electorate. I saw Christian Democratic politicians receive tumultuous applause whenever they said that foreigners “should not abuse our hospitality” or “must respect our laws and ways.”
This is a problem that Germany has made for itself, since it has been very liberal in taking people in but very restrictive in granting German citizenship. The result is that a staggering seven million people, out of a total population of eighty million, live as “foreigners” in Germany. Until quite recently, the main qualification for citizenship was to have German blood. Although the Christian Democrats changed the law to make it possible to gain citizenship after fifteen years’ residence, they held out firmly against dual citizenship for, say, longtime Turkish residents in Germany. (Yet Germany itself is quite happy to grant dual citizenship to ethnic Germans living in Poland.) With a red-green government this should change, giving the country a normal, liberal citizenship law, more comparable with those in Britain and America. Altogether, it should encourage a more welcoming attitude to immigrants and to the whole idea of Germans being of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
My second guess is more pessimistic—for Germany, though perhaps not for its competitors. Helmut Kohl probably did larger things for his country than Margaret Thatcher did for hers. (To be fair, larger things needed doing. The United Kingdom did not need to be reunited.) But Kohl failed to do precisely those big things that Thatcher did: reducing the power of the trade unions, privatization, deregulation, lowering direct taxation, cutting public spending, and so on. In Britain, this is the foundation that Tony Blair can build on. Now Gerhard Schröder fought a campaign of Blair-like discipline and razzmatazz. But, to be a Blair in office, you need first to have had your Thatcher.
Virtually all German business leaders argue that if Germany is to remain competitive and to create new jobs, it needs some of that medicine. It needs Thatcherism with a human face. But can this new government deliver it? Schröder says economic and social reform is his top priority. He is famously close to business leaders and was on the board of Volkswagen. He understands some of what needs to be done. On the other hand, he was recently involved in a spectacular state bailout of a failing steelworks. The state of which he has been premier, Lower Saxony, has run up a large public debt. Moreover, he has promises to keep: that promise to restore pensions, for example. He also promised to defend the welfare state, promote “social justice,” and finance job creation.
His own party, under Oskar Lafontaine, will surely try to keep him to that. Indeed, the Social Democrats actually favor a higher top rate of income tax than the Greens do: 49 percent, against the Greens’ proposed 45 percent. But the Greens have their own pet scheme: a rapidly increasing tax on gasoline. German industry does not think that will help its competitiveness. If you add up the chancellor’s track record and promises, his coalition of coalitions, the strength of the trade unions, and the whole postwar German tradition of change by consensus, you do not get a recipe for rapid implementation of the reforms that German business leaders think essential.
Finally, a guess about foreign policy, in which Schröder has promised “continuity.” This promise is credible, but I suspect the character of this continuity will be “the same, only less so.” The Greens and the Social Democratic left have a record of anti-NATO protest. A Green foreign minister may be bad for NATO military actions “out of area,” since, whatever his personal convictions, he will have to pay some attention to his own party’s pacifists. The outgoing defense minister, Volker Rühe, an outspoken advocate of both NATO enlargement and NATO intervention in Kosovo, told me he fears that the close partnerships for effective action that he has built up, especially with the United States, may be imperiled.
In the European Union, Schröder signaled continuity by paying his first foreign trip to Paris. Despite his past reservations about European monetary union, he’ll try to make it work. But, like most of his generation, he will, I believe, be cooler and more hard-nosed about any further steps of European integration than were the postwar Euro-enthusiasts such as Helmut Kohl. Even if the inaugural speeches contain the usual visionary Euro-rhetoric, he won’t in fact be pursuing any personal vision of ever closer union.
This will make him a more congenial partner for Britain. He has talked in the past of turning the Franco-German axis into a Franco-German—British triangle. On the other hand, there is at least one mighty argument ahead: about Germany’s desire to reduce its outsize contribution to the EU budget. And cost will also be a problem when it comes to detailed negotiations about eastward enlargement of the u
nion. Sitting in Berlin, the new government will see more clearly the necessity but also the difficulties of bringing in the neighbors just up the road. In this regard, too, we may expect more cool pragmatism, with close attention to both national interest and public mood.
THERE ARE my three guesses. But they are just guesses. What has been extraordinary about Germany in the 1990s has been the great continuity of its policies, despite the fact that the country’s shape, size, internal composition, and geopolitical position have all changed with unification. This continuity was due to Helmut Kohl, the deutsche mark, and the Bonn republic. Now it’s good-bye to all that. Like it or not, the Berlin republic maybe more interesting.
CHRONOLOGY
1998
SEPTEMBER. Atrocities are committed by Serb forces in Kosovo. NATO responds with threats of air strikes against Serbia.
12 OCTOBER. An agreement between U. S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević provides for two thousand OSCE “verifiers” in Kosovo, NATO air surveillance, and negotiations for a political settlement.
16 OCTOBER. Twentieth anniversary of the election of Pope John Paul II.
OCTOBER. New German chancellor Gerhard Schröder indicates that eastward enlargement of the E U may depend on Germany getting a satisfactory reduction in its contribution to the EU budget.
“BE NOT AFRAID!”
BREZHNEV, CARTER, DENG XIAOPING, CALLAGHAN, SCHMIDT: Where are they now? These were the “world leaders” back in October 1978, when a little-known Polish cardinal stepped out onto St. Peter’s Square as the new pope and proclaimed his electrifying message: “Be not afraid!” Twenty years on, those worldly leaders are long since retired or dead, but the “servant of the servants of God” is still with us, still traveling the world, still tirelessly proclaiming the same urgent, universal message to all humankind.
At seventy-eight, he is frail and bent now. That rugged, athletic figure has been worn down by Parkinson’s disease, by the assassin’s bullet that tore through his intestines in 1981, and by two decades of ceaseless toil. He used to ski for hours; now he leans on his old ski-sticks for support while taking undemanding walks. His voice used to be so powerful and clear, with a skilled actor’s delivery that John Gielgud once described as “perfect.” Now it is often slurred. His broad, smiling face used to radiate human warmth for a hundred yards around—a quality he shared with his “fellow Slav” Mikhail Gorbachev. Now the face is half frozen with Parkinson’s. His left hand trembles uncontrollably.
Yet still you glimpse flashes of the old magic, as the distant figure, all in white, draws a whole crowd to him with a characteristic gesture: gently but repeatedly lifting two outstretched open hands. Then he speaks to half a million people as if he were talking to one person. It’s the magic that I saw in communist Poland, where he dissolved the fear instilled by all Brezhnev’s divisions with one wave of that now trembling hand. And still he goes on admonishing the rulers of this world, whatever their political color, whether Castro or Clinton. Still he offers succor to the poor, the weak, the sick, the oppressed in every land.
You might think from this opening hymn of praise that I’m a Catholic, even a papal groupie. Far from it. Indeed, if I were a Catholic, I might be much less enthusiastic. His fiercest critics are among his own flock. I leave it to them to argue about his restoration of a “monarchical” papacy and the stifling of debate inside the Church. As an agnostic liberal, albeit one rooted in a rich humus of Christianity, my concern is not with the Church but with the world. And I want to argue that Pope John Paul II is simply the greatest world leader of our times.
I say this not just because of what I saw him do in Poland, although of course that counts. Nor is it simply because I have experienced the force of his personality in a small gathering, although that was unforgettable. Over these twenty years, I have had the chance to talk with several credible candidates for the title of “great man” or “great woman”—Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Václav Havel, Lech Wałȩsa, Margaret Thatcher—but none matches Karol Wojtyła’s unique combination of concentrated strength, intellectual consistency, human warmth, and simple goodness.
Yet my case rests on his public record. No one has conveyed a better message, more effectively, to more people. What is this message? When he arrived on St. Peter’s throne, it was all there, fully formed, ready to go. He immediately wrote it down, in longhand, for his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis (“The savior of man”). But there’s a problem here. A philosopher, poet, and playwright as well as a pastor, he writes in a dense, difficult linguistic blend of Thomism (the philosophy based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas), phenomenology, and Polish Marian mysticism. After tackling his book The Acting Person, an American philosopher observed mildly, “I could not quite decide what the author was up to.” Yet in conversation or on his travels, he can say what he means with stunning simplicity.
One common mistake is to suggest that he looks at the whole world through a Polish prism. Of course, he is profoundly Polish. If you ever doubt that—and he hardly conceals it—just listen to him speaking directly to the Virgin Mary before the great monastery of Czȩstochowa, emotionally addressing her as “Queen of Poland.” (It’s also deeply moving, for he really is like a man talking to a much-loved mother. His own mother died when he was eight.) But when I once had dinner with him, in a circle of Polish friends, speaking Polish, I was struck by the very opposite impression. Here was a man who, far from looking at the world through Polish lenses, looked even at Poland through the prism of his global experience, faith, and mission.
The other common mistake is to interpret him in conventional political categories, such as “left” and “right.” Many in the West see him as just an old, dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. Gorbachev, by contrast, says the pope is a man of the left. In fact, he has always been fiercely critical of both capitalism and communism. But, as he insists in one of his encyclicals (Solicitudo rei socialis), the Church’s doctrine is “not a ‘third way’ between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism.” Tony Blair and Bill Clinton please note. Rather, it is “a category of its own.” It is not ideology but theology. On the plane out to Poland for his first, great pilgrimage in 1979, he told journalists that the differences between communism and capitalism are superficial: “Underneath is where the people are.”
His first concern is with what he believes to be the presence of God and Christ in the world. But, translated into the language of secular politics, his message becomes a set of demands to those who wield political, economic, or cultural power—demands on behalf of the people “underneath.” And a matching set of appeals to those individual people. At the center is always what he calls “the human person” (comprising, in Catholic teaching, body, reason, and soul). He insists that each and every individual human being has an ineradicable dignity and inalienable rights—the poorest child in the worst barrio in Mexico City no less than the richest man in New York. John Paul II’s passionate embrace of the language of human rights, previously associated with the heirs of the Enlightenment, was little short of revolutionary. And he preaches this gospel of human rights to one and all. He told Fidel Castro to respect his citizens’ human rights, but also General Stroessner in Paraguay.
Everywhere, he takes the part of the poor. He may condemn “liberation theology,” but his own Latin American homilies have been full of the liberation theologians’ concerns for the structurally oppressed. His demands for “social justice” make pure neoliberal free-marketeers squirm. The right to work belongs to his core notion of human dignity. Again and again, he has denounced the evil of unemployment in capitalism, as well as that of “senseless work” in command economies.
Another great theme is tolerance and mutual respect between different peoples and faiths. He grew up with Jewish schoolfriends in prewar Poland, and reconciliation between Christians and Jews is very close to his heart. He has not gone as far as some Jewish leaders would like in acknowledging the Catholic Church’s own his
torical responsibility for anti-Semitism, but he has gone farther than any of his predecessors. He also reaches out to Islam. Visiting Zagreb, he ordered Catholic Croats to respect the “outstanding presence” of muslims in the Balkans. If the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington is right that the next great world conflict will be “the clash of civilizations” (which, by the way, I don’t think he is), it will certainly be no fault of this pope.
Everywhere, too, he preaches peace. On this he has been utterly consistent. Even in Nazi-occupied Poland, he refused to support armed resistance. “Prayer is the only weapon that works,” he told a friend. In Japan, he cried, “Never again Hiroshima! Never again Auschwitz!” In Ireland, he told the IRA to abandon the violence that would “ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish.” In Britain, he criticized the Falklands War. And he opposed the Gulf War, too. All peoples have a right to justice and sovereignty, he says, but these may be achieved only by nonviolent means. As he told his fellow Poles in 1983, when General Jaruzelski had tried to dash their hopes with tanks, “You must defeat evil with good.”
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