ARTICLE EXTRACTS: Volume XVIII, No 1, SPRING 2001

Why Do They Kill? The Basque Conflict in Spain
Paddy Woodworth

Bilbao's brand new airport terminal is a shimmering glass wonder, hung on elliptical arches, something like the rib cage of a whale. This elegant space-age building, designed by one of Spain's hottest architects, Santiago Calatrava, promises visitors that they are in the anteroom to a confident and prosperous society. They are, indeed, about to enter one of the most dynamic regions of the European Union. Well-informed travelers, however, may wryly wonder if the structure is not modeled on the anatomy of a shark, because they will have some idea that they are also entering the belly of a beast.

The drive into the city tends to confirm the more benign impression. Once notorious for its filth and pollution, the Basque industrial capital has undergone a remarkable makeover. This is epitomized by the signature work of another cosmopolitan architect, Frank Gehry's triumphant Guggenheim museum, which has attracted upmarket international tourism to the city for the first time.

Yet this is the same Basque Country that is home to ETA, an organization that has killed nearly 800 people over the last 33 years. With the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its loyalist opponents at least nominally on cease-fire, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna-Basque Homeland and Liberty) has become the last group waging a sustained terrorist campaign in Western Europe. Moreover, a substantial minority of the population supports ETA's use of the pistol and car bomb in pursuit of an independent Basque state. There are also many Basques who oppose ETA, as witnessed by huge citizens' demonstrations for peace. Individuals who openly criticize ETA, or transgress against the group's principles, whether they are politicians, academics, journalists or even footballers, may pay for their temerity with their lives.

But ETA is not the only abuser of human rights in this fiercely polarized atmosphere. In the 1980s, a small-scale but vicious "dirty war" was sponsored by the Spanish Interior Ministry. Even today, allegations of rights violations by the security forces are common, and have been endorsed, to a degree, by Amnesty International and the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture. Meanwhile, relationships between the democratic Basque nationalist parties and the Spanish governing party have deteriorated to a point where mutual accusations of "fascism" are commonplace.

A strategy of "street struggle" by young ETA supporters costs tens of millions of dollars worth of damage to private and public property in political vandalism every year. Businesses, big and small, pay millions more in a "revolutionary tax" extorted by ETA. One is tempted to say they can afford to-this is still one of Spain's most prosperous regions. Nor are the radical nationalists excluded from this prosperity. Many of the teenagers who petrol-bomb banks in support of ETA are from middle-class backgrounds.

This youth violence has in turn produced new legislation from Madrid, greatly extending the definition of "terrorist acts" and introducing long prison sentences for minors. The Spanish committee of UNICEF has expressed concern on this issue.

Why should this conflict persist when disputes as intractable as Ireland's seem to be on the road to resolution? Why should successive generations of Basques feel sufficiently alienated to commit themselves to "armed struggle"?

These questions are all the harder to answer because the received wisdom on the Spanish transition from Franco's dictatorship to a liberal parliamentary democracy is that it was exemplary, a model for Latin American countries with similarly authoritarian pasts. Moreover, Spain's 1978 constitution gives exceptionally strong recognition to the country's minority nationalities. At the other end of the Pyrenees to the Basque Country, the Catalans have used these extensive powers of devolved government to make Barcelona and its surrounding provinces one of the great success stories of late twentieth-century Europe. They have also restored their distinctive language to its dominant position in the region, after decades of suppression under Franco's dictatorship. And they have achieved all this without firing a shot. Three Basque provinces enjoy even greater autonomy from Madrid than the Catalans. For the last 20 years, the Basque government has been dominated by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), yet the Basque war goes on and on.

Why is Basque nationalism still the sharp and bloody stone in the shoe of Spain's otherwise triumphal march to the top table of the European Union? Why did ETA's 1998 truce, explicitly modeled on the IRA's approach to the Irish peace process, break down after 14 months, unleashing the most intense series of shootings and bombings since 1992?

 back

The Dilemma of Dirty Money
Lawrence Malkin and Yuval Elizur

Whether protected by the stolid, self-righteous stone frontage on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse, or secluded off the quais of the Rhone in Geneva, banks make Switzerland. This national myth began more than two centuries ago when Swiss Calvinists sheltered the wealth of the aristocracy fleeing the wrath of the revolutionaries across the mountains in France. Today, a client enters a spacious hall filled with purposeful people humorlessly conducting the serious business of changing, storing, and guarding money, then glides past the tellers to the last window and whispers the name of a bank officer. An electric buzzer opens a discreet door. A private elevator rises above the busy banking hall.

Upstairs, an obsequious flunky awaits, nodding the guest into a carpeted room with a hushed atmosphere. Finally, an anonymous man appears with a file of numbers. No names, please. He presents papers to transfer money, buy or sell securities, deposit or withdraw cash. Signatures are exchanged. No piece of paper need ever leave the premises, and any French client would risk his liberty by taking home even a slip with a number on it. Crossing the Swiss border, a prosperous-looking French taxpayer is as likely to be stopped and even body-searched as a black driver on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Numbered Swiss accounts must have seemed to offer this cosseted kind of shelter to the incongruously named Col. Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos, chief of intelligence under President Alberto Fujimori of Peru. During the past decade, Montesinos or his representatives forwarded some $50 million in arms commissions, bribes, and other kinds of dirty money to the Zurich offices of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and two Israeli banks, Bank Leumi and First International Bank of Israel. Until, that is, one of the three-Swiss authorities will not say which bank-raised an alarm last November to Switzerland's central money laundering office.

The Zurich public prosecutor, empowered by a criminal complaint from Lima that had been prompted by no less than the Swiss ambassador, promptly froze the accounts. Even in hiding Montesinos could no longer touch his now exposed wealth. But the most surprised character in the drama was probably Fujimori himself, who had conducted a public search for Montesinos in a vain attempt to blame the corruption on him. Peruvians assumed that Montesinos could never have amassed such huge sums without the knowledge and probably the collusion of his patron. Fujimori was forced to flee across the Pacific to the land of his ancestors, and his autocratic regime collapsed, a victory for democracy and human rights from an utterly unexpected source. Mere numbered accounts, as many have learned to their chagrin, do not provide sufficient protection against serious crimes of state; secret Swiss accounts of several Serbian cronies of Slobodan Milosevic have been frozen, as well as more than a hundred linked to various schemes of the Russian kleptocracy.

Only a few years ago this would have provided little more than the raw material for the plot of an implausible political thriller. These now are seen as textbook cases by officials trying to illuminate this dark side of financial globalization. Because of the public obloquy heaped on them for their shameless behavior in stealing Holocaust victims' accounts after World War II, the Swiss have been in the vanguard of dealing with a problem that has far outgrown its original impetus, which was not Jewish money seeking a safe haven but drug money fleeing the law. This now is estimated at only one-third to one-half of the world's criminal finance, which has long depended on international banking and the cooperation of political elites.

Jonathan Winer, recently deputy assistant secretary of state for enforcement in the Clinton administration, prosecuted a man in a 1970s banking scam who later turned up laundering money for one of the Reagan administration's adventures in Central America. In a more notorious example, the original expertise of the terrorist Osama bin Laden did not lie in killing infidels. As the well-connected scion of a Saudi construction millionaire, his principal job in the Afghan resistance during the 1980s, according to American Treasury officials, was funneling Arab and CIA arms money through a network of banks. Now the ruling Taliban protects him, in part because he helps market Afghanistan's main cash crop, which is opium.

The Clinton administration's point man on money laundering was William Wechsler, a young policy wonk who began in a junior position in the National Security Council. Early on, he reasoned that if he could pierce financial secrecy by ensuring that banks knew the real owners of every major account, he could do more to alleviate poverty in countries ruled by corrupt dictators than an army of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Later, he was brought into the Treasury by then Secretary Lawrence Summers to work full time on the issue, which Summers made a priority.

Suprisingly few human rights groups have stooped to examine this kind of corruption. A rare exception is Oxfam, which estimates that $50 billion a year is drained from poor countries by offshore banks. Last October, Transparency International, a Berlin-based NGO, belatedly persuaded a dozen big international banks to agree publicly to monitor the accounts of public officials and their families, which was partly a preemptive strike against stronger government action. By far the most persistent pressure comes from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It has illuminated the mysteries of private and offshore banking through expert studies and public hearings conducted with rare bipartisanship by Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, and Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan. In opening hearings this March on money laundering, Sen. Levin, the bulldog of the two, remarked, "We can't fight human rights in all parts of the globe, and then let corrupt public officials steal from their own people and place corrupt funds in US bank accounts to enjoy the safety and soundness of the US banking system. Money laundering not only finances crime, it pollutes the international banking system, impedes the international fight against corruption, distorts economies, and undermines honest government."

 back

Illusions of the Second Nuclear Age
Robert Jay Lifton

By a perverse paradox, even though the danger of a nuclear calamity-whether by design, accident, or through an act of terror has grown greater, most of us seem less inclined to talk or even think about it. The Cold War has ended, its ideological fevers have abated, and thus falsely reassured, so have our fears of a nuclear holocaust. Yet the weapons remain, arms control is at a standstill, a new administration's secretary of defense talks wistfully of resuming nuclear testing to upgrade an aging nuclear arsenal, and elsewhere the furies of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism rage as seldom before. We can usefully speak of a second nuclear age, with its fresh illusions about protecting ourselves from these weapons, even as the number of would-be nuclear acolytes continues its alarming increase.

The New Psychic Numbing
No discussion of psychic numbing with respect to nuclear weapons could have much meaning without what we might call a nuclear baseline. That baseline-that ultimate nuclear truth-lies in what the weapons do to human beings. So let me sum up in a few sentences what I learned about that nuclear truth while living in Hiroshima and interviewing survivors some decades ago-keeping in mind that the Hiroshima bomb was, by present standards, the tiniest of nuclear weapons.

From the split second during which one was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, one came to experience a lifelong immersion in death and a lifelong death taint-which I described in four stages. There was first the sea of death one encountered at the moment of the bomb blast, the sense of being inundated by ugly dying and of witnessing something close to the end of the world. Survivors retained lifelong images of ultimate horror. The second stage occurred shortly afterward, within days or weeks, in the form of grotesque symptoms of acute radiation effects: bleeding from all of the bodily orifices, severe diarrhea and dehydration, high fever and weakness, and again many deaths. The third stage came months or years, even decades later: delayed radiation effects, including an increased incidence of leukemias and other forms of cancer, left survivors feeling that they were constantly being stalked by death.

The fourth stage was the experience of the permanent identity of the hibakusha, or "explosion-affected person," meaning survivor of the atomic bomb, which for many included feelings of being as if dead. This had to do with both the survivors' profound identification with those who were killed by the bomb (whose number can never be known, with estimates ranging from 70,000 to 200,000), and with their own vulnerability to death. That identity and that death taint, it was feared, could be passed on to subsequent generations because of the possibility of hereditary transmission of radiation effects. So the immersion in death extended not only over one's entire lifetime but, at least in one's fears, to one's descendants as well.

We don't hear much about those human effects these days, but we would do well to have in mind this baseline as we confront the realities of nuclear weapons. The second nuclear age, which began after the end of the Cold War, is only about a decade old. But it follows upon a half-century of the existence of the weapons in the world, a salient factor in its psychological currents. We have, as the expression goes, "lived with" nuclear weapons for more than five decades, but this cohabitation is far from benign. Its consequences can be malignant in the extreme.

During the first nuclear age, from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s, there was a collective inclination toward muting our feelings about these weapons, especially our fear. But that fear periodically manifested itself. Immediately after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans experienced a confusing mixture of triumphalism and anxiety. The anxiety was again widely visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and still again during the extraordinary protests of the mid-1980s, including the nuclear-freeze and international physicians' movements. Awe, terror, and fear, along with what I have called imagery of extinction, the anticipation of the end of everything, were never far from the surface.

But during our second nuclear age, we have more or less become used to nuclear weapons as part of our landscape. To be sure, we have not lost that awe and anxiety, but as with any group of longstanding residents, there is a tendency toward acceptance. The second nuclear age-for the United States at least-has so far been a period of relative (and misleading) nuclear quietism, sustained even after the testing of weapons in India and Pakistan. The factor at work here is our relief at no longer living in a world in which the two superpowers kept each other in their nuclear sights, while repeatedly threatening to destroy the world in the name of something called "national security."  That relief is real, a response to a good thing, or at least to an end of the worst thing imaginable.

The trouble is that in other ways the dangers associated with nuclear weapons are greater than ever: the continuing weapons-centered policies in the United States and elsewhere; the difficulties in controlling nuclear weapons that exist under unstable conditions (especially in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union);2 and the eagerness and potential capacity of certain nations and "private" groups to acquire and possibly use the weapons. In that sense, the nuclear quietism is perilous. Or, to put the matter another way, we no longer manifest an appropriate degree of fear in relation to actual nuclear danger. While fear in itself is hardly to be recommended as a guiding human emotion, its absence in the face of danger can lead to catastrophe.

We human animals have built-in fear reactions in response to threat. These reactions help us to protect ourselves-to step back from the path of a speeding automobile, or in the case of our ancestors, from the path of a wild animal. Fear can be transmuted into constructive planning and policies: whether for minimizing vulnerability to attacks by wild animals, or for more complex contemporary threats. Through fear, ordinary people can be motivated to pursue constructive means for sustaining peace, or at least for limiting the scope of violence. Similarly, in exchanges between world leaders on behalf of preventing large-scale conflict, a tinge of fear-sometimes more than a tinge-can enable each to feel the potential bloodshed and suffering that would result from failure.

But with nuclear weapons, our psychological circuits are impaired. We know that the weapons are around-and we hear talk about nuclear dangers somewhere "out there"-but our minds no longer connect with the dangers or with the weapons themselves. That blunting of feeling extends into other areas. One of the many sins for which advocates of large nuclear stockpiles must answer is the prevalence of psychic numbing to enormous potential suffering, the blunting of our ethical standards as human beings.

 back

The Fires of Faith in Central Asia
Ahmed Rashid

The salient fact about Central Asia today is that independent statehood was neither coveted nor sought by the region's ruling Communist elites. It was thrust upon them when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Thus the region's rulers were suddenly compelled to fabricate a new identity for their five ethnically diverse states-Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan-and to contend for the first time with radically differing ideologies. A decade later, the same elites are in power. After a brief period of allowing some political freedom, they embarked on repressive campaigns to eliminate all forms of opposition, subverting democracy and elections almost as meticulously as the Soviets did and eliminating their political opponents through assassination, imprisonment, or exile. With the democratic and nationalist opposition effectively crushed, the survivors have moved underground and become armed and radicalized by Islamic fundamentalism, which seeks to overthrow the ruling elites, impose upon the region an imagined Islamic community of believers that has as its reference point seventh-century Arabia and the era of the Prophet Muhammad, and to restructure Central Asia through an anti-Western and anti-Russian crusade. Examining these insurgent groups will be the focus of this article.

Every act of state repression has pushed these militants into adopting even more extreme positions, while the dearth of Islamic teachings during the 74 years of communism has created a new conundrum. The militants' philosophy is based not on the indigenous Islam of Central Asia, which was the birthplace of Sufism-a tolerant, moderate form of Islamic mysticism-or nineteenth-century Jadidism-a modernist interpretation of Islam-but on imported ideologies from the Taliban in Afghanistan, the militant madrassas (Islamic schools) of Pakistan, and the extreme Wahabbi doctrine of Saudi Arabia. Contrary to Central Asia's own history, jihad (holy war), rather than ijtihad (reinterpretation and consensus), has become the strategy of these groups to mobilize popular support.

The civil war in Tajikistan (1992-97) was the first testing ground for the reinterpretation of Islam in Central Asia. Today, Islamic movements such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir al Islami and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan pose the greatest threats to the Central Asian regimes and stability in the region. Well armed and financed, highly motivated, and with extensive support from the wider world of Islamic radicalism and drug smuggling mafias based in Afghanistan, these are pan-Islamic and pan-Central Asian movements. The danger posed by Islamic radicalism in Central Asia is also rapidly changing the geostrategic picture as China, Russia, and the United States realign their regional strategies to meet this threat-while the Taliban and Islamic groups in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, and Kashmir help fuel the process of radicalization.

 back

China's Fledgling Civil Society: A Force for Democratization?
Rebecca R. Moore

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush expressed his support for extending permanent normal trade relations to China, characterizing trade as a powerful means of promoting the cause of freedom in China. The United States, he said, must engage China's emerging entrepreneurial class. Like Bill Clinton and former President Bush, the new president appears to favor engagement rather than the use of punitive trade measures as the best means of fostering democracy and greater respect for human rights in China. Precisely what forms of engagement his administration will support remains to be seen.

China's economic reforms, coupled with global markets and information technology, are increasingly connecting not only its business class but virtually all segments of Chinese society to the outside world, thereby producing new opportunities for engagement. These same trends have also been altering the relationship between the state and Chinese society in ways that have important implications for the status of human rights. Indeed, the Clinton administration frequently argued that globalization carried with it certain advantages for US human rights policy by empowering indigenous actors who, through various grass-roots efforts, have the potential to advance economic and political reforms at the state level. The United States, the administration argued, should avail itself of opportunities to assist these local actors, thereby improving prospects for indigenous political reform.

Clinton's interest in such opportunities dated to 1994 when, in conjunction with his decision to de-link human rights from the annual review of China's most-favored-nation trade status, he promised "a new and vigorous American program to support those in China working to advance the cause of human rights and democracy." His administration later proposed to work with Congress to develop a democracy program for China that would utilize American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) "to strengthen both civil society and the rule of law." China's economic reforms and the opening of Chinese society to the outside world had produced new social organizations that in turn offered opportunities for the United States and others "to support the development of civil society in China."

That the United States could address its human rights concerns through a proactive democracy program was not a new notion. President Reagan called for a worldwide campaign "to foster the infrastructure of democracy" as early as 1982, and his administration helped establish the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)-a quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization authorized by Congress in 1983 to promote freedom and democracy around the globe-in addition to implementing a number of democracy-building programs through various government agencies. Democracy building as an explicit component of US human rights policy was subsequently adopted by the Bush and Clinton administrations.

The Clinton team achieved only limited success in mobilizing the necessary congressional support. What support the administration did garner, however, was largely bipartisan. This may bode well for those who hope that the Bush administration will take advantage of new opportunities to influence Chinese society on behalf of democracy and human rights.

It is also important to note that the Clinton administration, in championing the opportunities for civil-society promotion in China, had plenty of company in the NGO community. Civil-society initiatives are enormously popular among the international groups working in China today. Their appeal appears to rest at least in part on the assumption, confirmed for many by events in Poland in 1989, that a strong civil society can act as a powerful vehicle for democratization by exerting pressure against the state from below. Programs designed to assist in the development of a vigorous civil society are thus often construed as a bottom-up, as opposed to a top-down, strategy for promoting democracy and human rights.

Characterizing civil-society initiatives for China in this way, however, is troublesome, largely because the emergence of China's civil society has not been a purely grassroots development. China's NGOs are linked to the state in a way that makes it difficult to reconcile the country's nascent civil society with the prevailing Western mode, that is, an autonomous sphere of voluntary associations capable of bringing pressure to bear against the state. The limited enthusiasm in Congress for Clinton's proposed civil-society initiative was due in part to the belief among members of Congress that the very notion of a "Chinese NGO" is an oxymoron.

China's "NGOs" do look different from their Western counterparts. However, China's civil society is still evolving, and neither its future nor the merits of outside efforts to foster its development should be assessed apart from the forces of globalization at work in China today. Continued economic liberalization, legal reform, and global communications technology have been strengthening Chinese society vis-·-vis the state and connecting it to the outside world in unprecedented ways. Globalization is, in effect, providing outside actors with new opportunities to encourage the development of a civil society that is capable of anchoring political and legal reform deep in Chinese society. The evolution of China's civil society may, ultimately, not fit the Western model, but if China is to democratize, reform must occur at the societal level as well as at the top. Civil-society initiatives constitute an important means of encouraging the changes essential to the evolution of a political system that is more democratic and more respectful of human rights.

 back

In from the Cold:
A New Approach to Relations with Russia and China
Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight

It is useful to keep in mind why the end of the previous great power conflict, the Second World War, does not, in most respects, offer useful lessons for those seeking guidance on how to achieve integration and reconciliation for Russia and China in the twenty-first century. The difference is obvious but critically important: the unconditional surrender, and subsequent extended occupation, of Germany and Japan made it possible for the United States and the West to force quick integration and eventual reconciliation with their former enemies. No such possibility exists with regard to Russia's and China's entrance into the mainstream of the twenty-first century.

In the absence of military occupation of Russia and China, and the consequent impossibility of their enforced tutelage in Western-style civil society, and political and economic affairs, by what indirect means might the United States and the West bring these powers in from the cold? How might this be accomplished, moreover, before Russia's and China's alienation from, and suspicion of, the United States and the West provoke a crisis, possibly leading to a military confrontation? If we cannot forcibly remold Russia and China according to Western political values, how can we reach them, make contact with them, develop a dialogue of mutual exploration, by the conclusion of which their integration and reconciliation might be achieved?

Realistic Empathy
Our answer is to deploy "realistic empathy," a process that, we believe, must lie at the heart of any successful strategy of bringing Russia and China in from the cold. With occupation not a realistic (or desirable) option, a policy based on empathy is an idea whose time has come. Think of it this way: a policy whose objective is not to preach but to listen; to learn something of the history and culture of Russia and China, rather than to proclaim the virtues of our history and systems; to treat them, in effect, as our equals, as peoples and cultures who seek peace and tranquility but also dignity and respect.

 back

Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa
Bill Berkeley

This is an essay about evil. Its setting is Africa. The characters are mostly African, with an American narrator and Americans in supporting roles. The time is the last decade of the twentieth century, post-Cold War. But the questions are timeless and universal: How do evil people operate? What accounts for their power? Why do people follow?

I first went out to Africa in 1983 as a wide-eyed freelance newspaper correspondent drawn to the great emancipation drama then unfolding in South Africa. I had fancied myself a budding specialist on race relations when, fresh out of college a few years earlier, I had gone to work for newspapers in Alabama and Georgia. But I was born too late to witness the wrenching traumas of the civil rights era. I had studied history in college, and as a journalist I wanted to watch history in the making. I was also the sort of person who, while shopping for fitted bed sheets in a Kmart in suburban Atlanta, felt myself suffocating, yearning to explore some of the grittier precincts of the globe. The struggle to bring down apartheid was my kind of story: a stirring crusade against manifest evil, the infamous system of racial tyranny helpfully delineated in black and white.

As is often the case in Africa, things didn't work out the way I had planned them. Visa problems kept me out of South Africa for a time, and so I wound up taking the slow road down the continent from Cairo: trains, buses, boats, trucks, taxis packed so tightly that my arms and legs fell asleep. There is a joke among expatriates in Sudan that once you have drunk from the White Nile, you're infected for life. In spite of myself, I had to agree. There was something about Africa that got into my blood and stayed there.

Note
Adapted from the forthcoming book, The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa. Copyright (c) 2001 by Bill Berkeley. To be published this spring by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Book Group. All rights reserved.

 back

German Halftime: Power Hobbles Yesterday's Rebels
Paul Hockenos 

In the early 1970s, with the radical West German student movement subdued and splintered, Rudi Dutschke, its icon and strategist, realized that neither street protests nor Molotov cocktails nor revolutionary parties were likely to overthrow the capitalist order. Rather, the answer was in a long-term infiltration of the institutions of the republic at every level-the public schools, the universities, the media, and even the bourgeois body politic. With a Maoist twist, this strategy was dubbed "The Long March through the Institutions." As professionals, as well as through a broad network of citizens' initiatives, they would take the struggle for an egalitarian grassroots democratic society from the streets to the heart of German society.

The Long March took 25 years and ended in autumn 1998, not with socialism but with a commanding electoral mandate for a Social Democratic-Green coalition government. No longer recognizable as a long-haired peacenik agitating for the social democratic youth movement, Gerhard Schręder, the transformed representative of the party's nonideological New Middle, took over as chancellor. The new interior minister, Otto Schily, was a founding member of the Green Party in the early 1980s and defense counsel for the Red Army Faction's Ulrike Meinhof. The impish, former anarcho-Marxist Joschka Fischer, who in sneakers and a black T-shirt had guided the Greens into state parliaments across West Germany, became foreign minister.

Had Rudi Dutschke lived to see the day, he probably would not have recognized much in Germany's new government that resembled the student rebels' original project. In fact, so broad is the consensus today in German politics that there is little in the coalition agreement that would offend an old-school Christian Democrat. Over the years, the Social Democrats, the party of August Bebel and Karl Kautsky, abandoned even the mildest references to class and the redistribution of wealth. Armed with the vague "Third Way" theories of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens, Social Democratic (SDP) leaders like Schręder have turned the party into a faceless entity whose main selling point during the campaign was simply the fact that it was not Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats.

The Greens, on the other hand, transformed themselves from an unruly umbrella organization of the peace, anti-nuke, environmental, and women's movements into a respectable left-liberal party that, until recently, was able to capture around 10 percent of the vote across most of (western) Germany. In the east, ten years after unification, the Greens are allied with a sad, marginalized party of former East German dissidents. There, they fail to attract even 2 percent of the vote. Instead, the revamped former Communist Party soaks up an enormous protest vote that could go right or left but certainly not to the kind of progressives who make their home in the Green Party.

No sooner had the new government come to power than it became obvious that there was neither a clear popular mandate for a sweeping red-green reform project, nor even a shared conception among the coalition partners that a red-green project existed at all. After 16 years of a Christian Democrat-Liberal government, which had racked up double-digit unemployment figures, German voters simply opted for a change at the top. Business as usual, but more business. Even within the parties there was no consensus on economic policy, reflecting the fault line between neo-liberals and social-welfare statists that runs straight through every German party. Had they had the chance, the Social Democrats almost surely would have swapped the noisy Greens for one of the two conservative parties, a threat Schręder repeatedly uses to bully his junior coalition partner into submission.

Despite intermittent successes, the government's first year was a disaster, which led to a string of embarrassing electoral defeats for both parties in major state votes across the country. It pushed the Greens to the brink of disintegration, their numbers down in 15 straight elections. On the domestic front, feuding between Schręder and his left-wing finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, blocked desperately needed budget, tax, and pension fund reforms. Lafontaine finally resigned in frustration, leaving the field open for Schręder's supply-siders. The SPD left has been cowed and mute ever since.

Two staple Green issues, the amendment of Germany's anachronistic citizenship law and the levy of an environmental tax on gasoline, were pushed through in watered-down form. The revised nationality law changed the requirements for German citizenship, from emphasis on bloodline to place of birth, enabling roughly half of the 7.3 million immigrants who live in Germany to qualify for German passports. Under the old norms, Germanness was deemed to reside in genes, thus in practice excluding from citizenship even many second-generation immigrants born in Germany. Even though neither the tax nor the citizenship law produced the reforms the Greens had championed for years, they certainly can be chalked up as progressive measures. The citizenship law, in particular, is a critical step toward changing Germany's definition of itself as an ethnically homogenous nation-state. As in France or the Netherlands, the racial diversity on the streets of Munich or Hamburg will one day be reflected on the national soccer team and at the ballot box.

But the new government's legitimate victories on contested terrain were characteristically and effectively turned against it. The opposition conservatives, tapping crude populist slogans, waged a nationwide petition campaign to discredit the citizenship amendment. In elections in the state of Hesse, the Christian Democrats used this to capture an old Social Democratic stronghold. Rather than back the measure to the hilt, Schręder retreated and accepted a watered-down version of the law.

The question that very nearly brought down the fledgling government, however, was Kosovo. Both the Social Democrats and the Greens have strong pacifist wings, factions that have fought tenaciously since the early 1990s to block the lifting of postwar taboos on German military involvement abroad, even in peacekeeping missions. Germany's participation in the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the country's first involvement in war abroad since 1945, split both parties between stalwart pacifists and those, like Foreign Minister Fischer, who believed it was morally imperative for Germany to help stop the atrocities occurring in Kosovo. Even though it was Berlin that brought Russia and the European Union together to help broker an end to the war, defections from the Green Party over the issue cost it heavily.

Year Two saw the fortunes of the Social Democrats soar, largely a result of good luck beyond their wildest dreams. One of the biggest scandals in postwar German history caught the Christian Democrats red-handed in a web of financial misdeeds and lies that threw their party into disarray. Schręder and his new team also broke the pathetic years-long "reform jam" by streamlining the budget and overhauling tax laws. With Lafontaine gone and corporate Germany behind him, Schręder pushed through a pro-business tax plan that will slash rates for individuals and corporations, changes that will dramatically liberalize the structure of German business. Unemployment has also begun to inch downward, at least in the western states. Almost overnight, the man who could do nothing right became the "can do" chancellor.

 back

Prosecuting Dictators: International Law and the Pinochet Case
Susan Waltz

International law, so runs a common critique, is imprecise, unenforceable, and irrelevant. Realists have long been skeptical about its usefulness as a constraint on state behavior. In 1987, the political scientists Stephen Haggard and Beth Simmons expressed the prevailing view in academe that the study of international law was "virtually moribund." Fifteen years later, in the wake of the Pinochet affair, it seems time for a fresh look.

In October 1998, Gen. Augusto Pinochet traveled to London from Chile for medical treatment. Within days, he was served with an arrest warrant by London's Metropolitan Police, honoring a preliminary extradition request from Spain. The extradition request was contested, and appeals were ultimately heard in Britain's highest court. These appeals were conducted under British law, but the principles at stake were newly evolved standards of international law. British law lords found Pinochet extraditable, but in March 2000, Home Secretary Jack Straw decided that General Pinochet was too ill to stand trial and Britain's direct interest in the case came to a close. It appeared at the time that justice would have to be content with a statement of principle, delivered by the House of Lords.

However, the proceedings in Europe had stirred public interest in Chile, and soon after the general's return, judicial processes were reopened at home. By July 2000, Pinochet's parliamentary immunity had been lifted by Chile's Supreme Court, and nearly 200 lawsuits were filed against the general. Some of the charges have been limited and appeals are underway, but the general has been ruled fit to stand trial. He was placed under house arrest in January of this year.

Whatever the outcome for Pinochet, the "Pinochet case" has broad significance for the prosecution of human rights cases and in its potential to shape state behavior. Political authoritities in Britain were pressed to find solutions that would allow the government to maintain friendly relations with Chile, but they were not prepared to disregard the rulings of their highest court, based largely on international norms. International law, it may be said, guided state behavior.

International law does not recognize judicial review (stare decisis) as a source of law, but precedents nevertheless play an important role in guiding arguments and shaping debate. In this regard, the Pinochet case may be seen as a culmination and consolidation of small changes that had been brought about in international law over previous decades. To the extent that precedent informs future decisions, its chief effect is to help institutionalize norms that had previously existed primarily on paper.

Only a short time ago, the idea of holding an erstwhile dictator accountable outside his country for heinous deeds committed in his country would have been dismissed as preposterous. Evolution of international law, however, has turned the unthinkable into the actual. The Pinochet case grew out of subtle developments in international law, but the case itself also has implications for the future practice and development of international law and international politics.

 back