Pacifists at War: the German Green Party's Special Convention on The
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Wesleyan University College of Social Studies Pacifists at War: The German Green Party’s Special Convention on the Kosovo War by John McNeil Class of 2008 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree in Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the College of Social Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2008 2 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 INTRODUCTION 4 ONE The German Greens From Protesting to Governing The Greens’ First Decade 12 Debating Military Interventions During the 90s 22 Kosovo, German Politics, and NATO Diplomacy 48 TWO The Bielefeld Special Convention on the Kosovo War Preparations for Bielefeld 61 May 13, 1999 67 The Delegates Vote 74 Interpreting the Result 81 THREE Topics and Voices in the Bielefeld Debate Contesting a Moral Dilemma 95 Problems of Political Responsibility 100 Feuerpause versus Waffenstillstand 107 Realo Minor Petitions 118 Leftist Minor Petitions 128 Splitting the left vote? 144 FOUR Toward an Explanation of Bielefeld 149 CONCLUSION 164 BIBLIOGRAPHY 171 3 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have turned out in anything like its current form had it not been for the generous assistance I benefited from at many stages. I would like to thank Professor Ulrich Plass and Professor Sarah Wiliarty for their consultation and support at the outset, Professor Erik Grimmer-Solem for the flexibility, encouragement, and perceptive questions he offered as my thesis adviser, and Kat Aymeloglu and Howie Lempel for reading drafts and giving valuable feedback. Special thanks to Gabriele Giwan of Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis for her extremely helpful correspondence and for making audiovisual and other indispensable sources available. Needless to say, any mistakes or deficiencies remaining in this thesis are mine alone. 4 Introduction On May 24, 1999, NATO governments carried out the alliance’s threat to bomb Yugoslavia. The bombing campaign was conceived as an act of coercive diplomacy to secure Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s consent to the Rambouillet Accords, a settlement proposed by NATO to the ongoing conflict in Kosovo that pitted the Serbian Army and paramilitaries against the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) and the majority Albanian population of the region. In a speech on the day the bombings began, President Clinton cited three goals: “to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO’s purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the imperative of reversing course, [to] deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo, and if necessary to seriously damage the Serb military’s capacity to harm the people of Kosovo.”1 The bombings continued for days, then weeks, then months, stymieing expectations by western leaders that Milosevic would quickly capitulate.2 NATO had not prepared for a long war: when operations began, the alliance had only 350 planes within range of Serbia, a force only adequate for a short operation, and a US aircraft carrier had been removed from the Adriatic in mid-March.3 Worse yet, although the war was presented to western publics by political leaders as serving humanitarian purposes, once the bombings were underway Serbian forces began carrying out a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, expelling hundreds of thousands of 1 Quoted in Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 101. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 104 5 ethnic Albanians, who became internally displaced or else hovelled in refugee camps in neighboring countries.4 Not only did the bombing of targets in the Yugoslavian regions of Vojvodina, Serbia, and Kosovo fail to produce a quick diplomatic solution to the conflict in Kosovo, the military intervention was at best helpless to prevent the expulsions of Kosovar Albanians, and at worst furnished a pretext for them.5 As the bombings wore on through April and May 1999, NATO would have to scramble to reorient its goals and strategies. When the bombings began, the German Green party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, or Alliance 90/the Greens, to give it its official name) had been governing Germany for almost half a year as the junior partner to the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in what was known as the Red-Green coalition. Stemming from the vibrant alternative social movements of the 70s and 80s in Germany, the Greens were a party of pacifists, at least by tradition and reputation. The belief that all uses of military force in the international arena were illegitimate and immoral had been reaffirmed in the party’s 1998 election program: “We reject military peace enforcement and fighting deployments. [Militärische Friedenserzwingung und Kampfeinsätze lehnen wir ab.]”6 Yet just before entering government in the Fall of 1998, the majority of Green MPs had voted to authorize NATO’s threat to use force against Yugoslavia. What is more, after the failure of the Rambouillet negotiations in Spring 1999, Germany’s Green 4 Ibid., 108-9. 5 In their account based on interviews with high-level military and political officials from several NATO governments, Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute comment: “Remarkably, some officials appear to have ignored the basic fact that NATO airpower would simply not be physically able to stop Milosevic’s onslaught against the Kosovars.” Ibid., 106, 116. 6 Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, Grün ist der Wechsel: Programm zur Bundestagswahl 98 (Bonn: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, 1998), 135. 6 foreign minister Joschka Fischer was an important advocate of military action as the last resort for pressuring the Yugoslavian head of state into allowing international forces to enter Kosovo. How did the pacifist Greens, of all people, become direct political agents of Germany’s first war since Hitler? This thesis will answer that question by laying out the historical development of the party from 1980 to 1999, with special attention to changes in the Greens’ approaches to pacifism as a foreign policy. However, that chronology only sets the stage for addressing a more central problem: why did the Greens, at their May 13, 1999 special convention in Bielefeld devoted to debating the Kosovo war, pass a resolution expressing no fundamental opposition to the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, although Greens of virtually all factional stripes described NATO’s air war as a failure, and none defended its accomplishments so far or prospects for success? No one at the convention could claim that the NATO bombing campaign had already contributed to protecting Albanians in Kosovo from persecution; furthermore, no one made the case that the bombings themselves were likely to accomplish the goal of stopping human rights abuses or of enabling the return of refugees. Given those facts, why did the majority of the convention delegates pass a resolution calling for a temporary stop to the bombings, but not opposing the military strategy more fundamentally? Previous attempts to explain the Bielefeld convention prove helpful but not satisfactory in addressing this problem.7 Appreciating and critiquing in detail the 7Appreciating and critiquing in detail the secondary literature on the Bielefeld convention will have to wait until the second half of chapter two, once the run-up to 7 secondary literature on the Bielefeld convention will have to wait until the second half of chapter two, once the run-up to and the structure of the event have been thoroughly laid out. Still, the secondary literature’s general thrust can be summed up even at this early stage. Writers who mention Bielefeld have tended to explain the convention’s result by suggesting that for various reasons, the debate which took place there was something less, or other, than a serious moral debate about the permissibility of using military force to achieve humanitarian objectives, either in general or in the case of Kosovo specifically. The Greens’ preoccupation with details rather than fundamental principles,8 or their overriding desire to avoid jeopardizing their coalition government with the SPD,9 or the strategic obfuscations and triangulation by advocates of the two major petitions at the convention,10 tended to mute or supervene any direct moral debate on a question of war and peace. These types of conclusions might seem able to address the incongruity noted above between the outcome of the convention and the expressed attitudes of its participants. If the Greens’ negative assessment of the bombings did not translate into an unequivocal condemnation of them, it might be tempting to explain that discrepancy by reference to the conclusion in the secondary literature that the Bielefeld debate lacked direct engagement concerning moral principles and their application to the case in question, and the structure of the event have been thoroughly laid out. Still, the secondary literature’s general thrust can be summed up even at this early stage. 8 Heribert Prantl, Rot-grüne: eine erste Bilanz (Hamburg: Campe Verlag, 1999). 9 Steffen Schmuck-Soldan, “Der Pazifismus bei Bündnis 90/Die Grünen: Entwicklung und Stellenwert einer außenpolitischen Ideologie 1990-2000” (PhD dissertation, Humbolt Universität, 2004). 10 Joachim Raschke, Die Zukunft der Grünen: “So kann man nicht regieren” (New York: Campus Verlag, 2002). 8 but was controlled instead by some other impulse like performing political damage control, trying to stay in power, or getting sidetracked by the equivocal language of the major petitions presented. However, the conclusion that the Bielefeld special convention was not primarily a debate on the morality of a war has no solid foundation. If the scholarly and popular literature on Bielefeld thus far has failed to detect a moral debate at the convention, that is not because no such debate occurred, but rather because writers on the convention have drawn hasty conclusions from too narrow a base of evidence. None have elaborated the full range of opinion and argumentation at the convention; instead, each grants consideration to only a few speeches or proposed resolutions at most, usually ones by party elites.