Abstract

German Greens and Pax Europa

In 1998, during his first week in office, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, also the leader of the country's Green Party, made perfectly clear that he was "the foreign minister of Germany, not of the Greens" and that he would pursue a German, not a Green, foreign policy. Since then, he has not broken his word. Germany is now, after the United States, the largest supplier of troops to peacekeeping missions worldwide. For two decades, the German Greens have engaged with geopolitical issues, the moral crux of the matter for the left: post-Holocaust Germany's proper place in the world. No single example demonstrates the Greens' uneasiness with Germany's full-fledged debut on the world stage and the responsibilities that come with it than their mixed responses to the Balkan wars in the 1990s. The Germans envision a European foreign and security policy designed to facilitate conflict prevention, diplomatic initiatives and the integration of peripheral states into multilateral bodies. Fischer is Germany's keenest political tactician, and he always acts with one eye trained on the big picture.