Joschka Fischer
Pal, Amitabh
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Amitabh Pal Joschka Fischer Joschka Fischer is a defining figure in recent German history. His long and strange political journey culminated in his becoming Germany's...
...It's also about us: that we should never forget what happened...
...Dragged down by the weight of Schroeder's unpopularity, the Social Democrat-Green coalition narrowly lost in the fall of 2005...
...Second, we should really stick to our principles...
...And if things are going badly in Africa, it will hurt us...
...He chuckles.] It's expensive...
...In foreign policy, we redefined the role of Germany within a European framework...
...We changed society in the seven years we were in government at the federal level...
...Amitabh Pal is the managing editor of The Progressive...
...It's astonishing...
...That is an important difference between the Bush Administration and my own position...
...We also changed the citizenship law, an old demand of the German left...
...How have you come to terms with that...
...Christianity has been misused many times for terrible political purposes...
...Unilateralism will lead to the decline of American power...
...This was a big mistake because in the end, you can't reach a better, more peaceful society by the use of force...
...In the globalized world, it is not far away...
...Everything should be done to exhaust nonviolent means...
...I don't believe that the military option will be a solution...
...We are defending our way of life and not a high-security state...
...Fischer: Globalization is a reality and I don't see a serious alternative to that...
...There is no need for that...
...It's now happening with Islam...
...I met Fischer on a cold January morning at Princeton University, where he was serving a one-year position as a visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs...
...I was never a pacifist because there are moments when you have no other option than to fight...
...A lot of people are dying every day...
...You must be honest about your history, and you must act in a responsible way...
...But in the end, we changed it...
...Fischer: I am too realistic to believe in pacifism...
...Pacifism has played an important role...
...Fischer: As for Germany's past, what does it mean to come clean about it...
...Elections are important...
...Iraqis, American soldiers, young people...
...Fischer: This would lead the whole region into a very, very deep and dark hole...
...Also, institutions are important in the Iranian system...
...In an emotional meeting with the Green caucus in parliament, Fischer announced that he was stepping down as party leader...
...Ironically, Fischer never formally completed high school, and is an autodidact...
...We were ready to join our allies in the Balkans and Afghanistan but we rejected the move to wage war against Iraq...
...Maybe it's the wrong question to ask...
...In Europe, it was a hell of a fight for the environmentalists and the Greens...
...Even the conservative-led government is now following that course, more or less...
...I was in office, too...
...The average Iranian is interested in bread-and-butter issues...
...Fischer: Iran was decisively strengthened by the U.S...
...We are all so interconnected...
...Everybody enjoys driving a car but not burning fuel...
...At that time, the distance between London and the Hindu Kush mountains was very huge...
...So, we should also develop a policy that will strengthen those forces that will move Iran-a great country with a very important role in the region- toward a more pragmatic and responsible direction...
...Principles are very important, but you have to reconcile principles with reality...
...Q: Unlike some Greens, you haven't been completely committed to pacifism...
...We all live in the same world, rich and poor...
...But it should be a two-way street, as we all should have realized after September 11, 2001...
...I don't see the joy of burning fuel...
...For me, it is a part of my biography...
...I think it's lost...
...We waste heat...
...But we should also offer a door for serious negotiations...
...Q: What's your overall view of U.S...
...The responsibility of my country for the terrible crime of the Shoah will not fade away...
...And now, energy use is price-dependent...
...It's very important for our self-definition: that it will never happen again...
...The second option would be to open serious negotiations with Iran...
...He waited too long, much too long, for reasons unknown...
...I have apologized for my use of force publicly...
...Fischer: Sure...
...These are nearby in a globalized world...
...Do you think that Germany has come clean about its past...
...Abu Ghraib, Guant?namo-we shouldn't give up the basic principles of our constitutions, the rule of law, because this would be a victory for the other side...
...I don't believe that Iraq will be fixed in Iraq...
...It was an impossible idea that some nationalists or terrorists would have attacked London during the time of the British Empire...
...He appeared for the swearing-in ceremony in casual clothes and sneakers...
...Globalization is our destiny...
...You have to make the case," he told Donald Rumsfeld in February 2003 at a Munich meeting...
...And it is not only the fault of the Bush Administration...
...He was gracious and good humored in answering my questions, only once showing a flicker of annoyance when I asked him about Germany's past...
...Germany before 1968 was a very different country than the one after '68...
...You can't understand that without the required framework...
...And here Syria and Iran will be very important...
...The new Germany, the democratic Germany, is a wonderful country today...
...Q: What are your current thoughts on the Iraq War...
...We changed our energy policy...
...Therefore I think that we should really make clear that we will not accept its hegemonic aspirations and its nuclear program...
...The dire consequences would be uncontrollable...
...In 1983, he was elected to the German parliament and in 1985 became the minister of environment for the state of Hesse...
...Fischer: I never made a secret out of the fact that I was a member of the radical left, that I wasn't a pacifist, that I belonged to squatters and street-fighting groups in Frankfurt...
...For example, if I compare my middle class house over here in the United States-the housing, heating, everything-to my middle class household in Europe, we're much more advanced...
...He lost a considerable amount of weight and even ran the New York marathon in 2001...
...Fischer's personal life has been as eventful as his public one...
...And I cannot go to the public and say, 'Oh, well, let's go to war because there are reasons,' and so on, and I don't believe in them...
...What did you achieve...
...This is my problem...
...The average Iranian is not interested in his anti-Semitic hate, is not interested in his confrontational foreign policy...
...The left shouldn't fight against globalization...
...Fischer: First of all, you can't sit and wait until a terrorist group attacks...
...Q: Your wife is of Iranian origin, and you have been to Iran recently...
...Alas, as my meeting with Fischer revealed, he hasn't been able to stick to his weight-loss program...
...Iraq would be stabilized...
...So I would recommend to try everything to bring Syria over...
...It reminds me of the situation at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in the U.K., where we had a left-for good reason-fighting against industrialization...
...The only possibility is to create the conditions for a withdrawal...
...He continued his ascent by becoming in the mid-1990s the co-chair of the Green parliamentarians...
...I think he was sixteen years old...
...It would be very easy to change that and reduce energy consumption and have higher energy efficiency with better insulation...
...Q: You have differed from many progressives in your approach toward globalization...
...Everything should be done to improve this cooperation...
...strategy in Iraq...
...Two months later, he resigned as foreign minister...
...Never...
...During much of his stint in office, he was the most popular politician in the country...
...Q: What's the best way to fight Al Qaeda and global terrorism...
...In 1998, when Gerhard Schroeder won the chancellorship, the Greens, with 7 percent of the vote, became the junior partner in the ruling coalition, and Fischer became the vice chancellor and foreign minister...
...Let's use peaceful means...
...Here, I'm heating the garden in this weather...
...Q: How do you assess the Bush Administration's environmental policy...
...I am not an idealist...
...Fischer first gained public prominence in the late 1960s and the early 1970s as part of the German radical student movement...
...But, nevertheless, the use of force should always be the last resort...
...Fischer: We achieved a lot...
...The third element is to strengthen liberal forces around the world, especially in the Middle East...
...Q: And the broader question of Germany's past...
...In the early 1980s, Fischer got busy organizing the German Greens...
...We should never push them in the terrorists' corner...
...We took a citizenship law based on bloodlines and transformed it into a more modern, Western-type citizenship law...
...We-a number of states around the world-have created after 9/11 a highly efficient network of intelligence and police cooperation...
...It has a negative effect on my paycheck due to the heating cost...
...He got married for the fifth time in October 2005...
...It's not only toward the Jewish people...
...On the other hand, what are you fighting for...
...Iran's nuclear program is a serious threat if it can go through with it...
...Cooperation is the only answer...
...So, if he had admitted that in a more timely fashion, no one could have made a case out of it...
...But we also transformed Germany...
...Fischer: America is not in the lead...
...Q: There's some fear in this country of a Bush Administration military campaign against Iran...
...His modest professor's office was filled with books and magazines...
...He wrote a best-selling self-help book, My Long Race Towards Myself, chronicling his self-improvement saga...
...Q: My father remembered you and Daniel Cohn-Bendit as being regularly in the news when we lived in Germany in the late 1960s and early '70s...
...The majority of Muslims have goals that are not very different from the goals we all share-to lead a decent life, to prepare for the next generation, and to have peace and not terror and violence and war and destruction...
...This was in the last months of the war...
...Fischer: First of all, Grass was really a youngster...
...Why not...
...This is our history, and we have a historical and moral obligation for our history...
...Q: An issue concerning Germany that received a good amount of play recently in the United States was Nobel laureate Gunter Grass's belated admission that he served in the SS during World War II...
...We were the first generation after the Nazi period, and this was a very bitter struggle...
...We can't write off more than one billion people...
...But it was a fight against history...
...But this would underestimate completely the importance of the state and of the local levels...
...unilateralism...
...In office, Fischer disappointed some of his fellow party members by his interventionist stance in the Balkans, where he successfully advocated for German participation in the NATO action in Kosovo...
...Laughs.] Q: The Greens were in power in Germany as the junior partner for seven years...
...But we've also seen the limits of pacifism, such as in the Balkans and in Rwanda...
...When the left then started to reframe industrialization-limit the working day, better working conditions, more rights for the workers-then it started to get serious power...
...We cannot say, Somalia is far away, Afghanistan is far away...
...His battles with the German police earned him notoriety, and he spent seven weeks in jail during this period...
...The plants don't need the heat from the house...
...it should fight for humane globalization...
...Modern Islam is the alternative...
...But Fischer won praise domestically and inter-naionally for his opposition to the Iraq War...
...In 2000, Fischer decided to go on a diet, and completely forswore alcohol, a huge step for a self-proclaimed gastronome and oenophile...
...Maybe I am too Marxist in my way of thinking...
...Over the years, he earned a living from such disparate jobs as an autoworker, a taxi driver (which gave him "a deep insight into the human character," he told an editor at The Wall Street Journal), and a clerk at the Karl Marx Bookshop in Frankfurt...
...Q: A few years ago, photos surfaced of you beating up a policeman during a 1970s protest...
...Fischer: Unilateralism is not an option...
...Joschka Fischer: It's a big tragedy...
...We are defending open societies...
...His long and strange political journey culminated in his becoming Germany's vice chancellor and foreign minister from 1998 to 2005 as the leader of the German Greens...
...Excuse me, I'm not convinced...
...But the world needs American leadership-reasonable American leadership-because there is no other leader...
...Sometimes you have to do tough things to protect your country...
...Once there is an agreement reached with Syria, Iran would be isolated...
...The recent results of the local elections in Iran demonstrate very clearly that [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad has lost his majority because he hasn't delivered...
...This was the generation that had grown up during the Nazi dictatorship...
...We changed our environmental policy dramatically for the better...
...What should be done there...
Vol. 71 • June 2007 • No. 6
