Whether describing Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin or Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau – media around the world is in love with a word that entered dictionaries only five years ago. High time to retire it.

Artwork: © Dominik Herrmann

Love is a funny thing, especially when it’s between two men who wield great power and influence. For lack of a better word to describe the man hugs and compliments exchanged by the presumptive masters of the universe, American journalists are increasingly adopting a humorous appellation for male friendships once reserved for skateboarders and surfers: the bromance.

“The Trump-Putin Bromance Is Getting Even Shadier,” New York magazine declared as US media picked up on the mutual admiration between Donald, the Republican presidential candidate, and Vladimir, the third-term Russian president. In recent months, mainstream news organizations such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Newsweek have all used “bromance” in headlines to describe the unlikeliest twist in the troubled US-Russian relationship.

In mid-August, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, resigned following revelations about his earlier work for Putin’s client in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovy­ch. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign responded with a statement saying that “you can get rid of Manafort, but that doesn’t end the odd bromance Trump has with Putin.”

It’s fair to say that bromance inflation is eating away at political speech in the United States. Like most pranks, the first time it was funny, the second time absurd, and all subsequent instances totally gratuitous. Now every time two male politicians show the slightest inclination for each other, their relationship is dubbed a bromance, whatever that actually means.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary added bromance to its 2011 edition, along with cougar (“a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man”), tweet (as in Twitter), and crowdsourcing. Merriam-Webster defines a bromance as “a close nonsexual friendship between men.”

Empowered with such a sweeping definition, headline writers in recent years have unearthed Putin’s budding bromances with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The idea of a Putin-Erdogan lovefest is especially nonsensical considering that before their rapprochement this summer, they were slinging insults at each other over a Russian warplane downed by the Turkish air force. Their awkward July meeting in St. Petersburg was reminiscent of the 1939 British cartoon, by David Low, showing Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, then still allies, bowing politely to each on the battlefield. “The scum of the earth, I believe?” the Nazi dictator says as the Soviet tyrant replies: “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?” The title of the cartoon is “Rendezvous,” but it could have been “The Hitler-Stalin Bromance.”

Of course today’s bromances aren’t observable only among strongmen and tough guys. After US President Barack Obama visited Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa in June, the White House officially commented on their selfie with the words “true bromance.” It’s possible the term then made its debut in French via the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir.

According to Wired, Obama also has a bromance with his vice president, Joe Biden, and with rapper Jay Z, as revealed by MTV in 2012. In fact, that report “on the most high-profile bromance between a commander-in-chief and a hip-hop figure” may have been the moment when the word jumped from the lingo of pop culture to politics.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which followed Merriam-Webster in acknowledging bromance as worthy of definition, made an online appeal in early 2013 to fathom the expression’s origins. It turns out the earliest known publication of the word was in the April 2001 issue of TransWorld Surf magazine.

The word bro is much, much older. Originally a short form of “brother,” bro then passed into Black English before taking on the present meaning of “a conventional guy’s guy who spends a lot of time partying with other young men like himself,” according to the OxfordWords blog. Bromance is only one word in a growing subset of expressions based on bro, such as brogrammer (“loutish male computer programmer”) or brobituary (“an ex-bro who abandoned the fold and got married”). And then there are the Bernie bros – supporters of Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders who became notorious for their sexist attacks against now-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

A word as preposterous as bromance deserves no obituary. More women leaders may be the surest way of ensuring its quick and painless demise. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel met British Prime Minister Theresa May for the first time in July, they held good old-fashioned talks with no bros, no romance, and no nonsense.

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© REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

Moscow is looking better than it has in decades.

When I first visited the city 25 years ago, it was the decaying capital of world communism. A decade later, during an unprecedented oil boom, Moscow had become a jungle of runaway real estate developments and monster traffic jams. Today the city is undergoing yet another transformation.

Returning to see friends this summer, I barely recognized the place. In the city’s historic center, bicycle lanes and broad granite sidewalks now squeeze out cars. Parking rules are strictly enforced, and outdoor advertising has largely vanished.

The changes are not only cosmetic. Gourmet burger joints, kosher restaurants, and craft beer pubs vie for the foot traffic. As a friend and I sat on one of the ubiquitous summer verandas one evening, quaint trams trundled by.

Of course, Moscow’s incredible urban revival has its critics. Opposition politicians grumble that it’s a ploy to win over Moscow voters before parliamentary elections in September. Drivers complain that it’s even harder to get around. And small-time entrepreneurs are distraught that their street kiosks have been leveled in the name of beautification.

At the same time, it’s hard to find anybody who would deny that Moscow has become a more livable metropolis. Even as it continues to curtail Russians’ freedoms, the Kremlin is keeping open a safety valve for its most demanding and active citizens. President Vladimir Putin can’t forget the wave of anti-government protests that broke out five years ago, when tens of thousands of middle-class Muscovites took to the streets. The main job of Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin loyalist, is to keep them from doing it again.

“Cognitive dissonance” was how one Russian friend described Moscow’s facelift. Like Dorian Gray, the Russian capital is putting on an attractive public face while the political regime ossifies behind the Kremlin walls.

On the flight to Moscow, I was amazed to read a newspaper exposé detailing shady customs schemes on the Finnish-Russian border. After landing, I found out that investigators had just searched the home of Andrei Belyaninov, the chief of the Federal Customs Service, finding shoeboxes filled with cash and valuable paintings. Two days later, the Russian president sacked seven regional leaders.

“Servants, Not Friends”

As the economy limps along, the competition for scarce resources is increasing among Russia’s ruling class, Stanislav Belkovsky, an acquaintance and political analyst, told me over brunch. “Putin wants servants, not friends,” Belkovsky said. “The firings aren’t political but psychological. He’s getting tired of his friends.”

Does that make people at the top unhappy? “Yes,” Belkovsky replied. “But it’s unclear what that dissatisfaction will turn into.”

Palace intrigue is a topic that most Russians would rather avoid. Instead, creative minds in Moscow are turning to abandoned industrial spaces to open art galleries and bike shops. I met a former investment banker who now sells custom-tailored shirts in an old chocolate factory. As the plunging ruble renders trips to Western Europe and the United States unaffordable, Moscow’s young globetrotters are creating havens for themselves at home.

Journalists are finding it difficult to work in the current political climate. I know a dozen Russian colleagues who have moved away in the past five years, and during my visit, one old friend was packing up to emigrate to Canada with his family. Among other concerns, the space for investigative and critical reporting is getting narrower: One colleague told me that newsmakers are increasingly reluctant to give interviews, and that more decisions are being made behind closed doors.

Putin is still very interested in Ukraine, said a friend who works for one of the last independent broadcasters in Russia. “I’m afraid there is going to be war. It’s unfinished business that has to be finished,” he said. “He’ll definitely return to Ukraine militarily. He won’t leave it alone.”

That’s not to say that all my friends in Moscow were overcome by doom and gloom, even if nobody was overjoyed about the current state of affairs. One acquaintance, a rising star in a large state company, told me defiantly that he’s happy to hold Russian citizenship because it’s one of the hardest nationalities to come by, especially compared with US or German citizenship. At the same time, he said, he can easily get a visa for anywhere while living and working in his native country.

Another friend, who works for the Eurasian Economic Union, Putin’s rival to the EU, mocked Western fears of an aggressive Russia and blamed the United States for sowing strife. “With the exception of the Baltics, are the former Soviet republics really better off now than before independence?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to be together again?”

I took her question to be rhetorical and moved on. It was a warm summer evening on a veranda, and the trams reminded me of Prague.

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Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier caused consternation 
when he criticized a NATO exercise long in the making. His party, the SPD, seems to be testing out whether foreign policy could be an election winner.

© REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is used to surprises. But on the weekend before the Brexit vote, she read a headline that even she did not see coming: her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, complained in a newspaper interview about NATO’s “saber-rattling” and “war cries” on Russia’s border.

The word choice might not have been out of place in a Kremlin press release. But this was Merkel’s top diplomat criticizing a set of long-planned, multilateral military exercises in Poland and the Baltics in which Germany played a leading role. In Berlin, the corridors of power erupted in chatter over Steinmeier’s unexpected remarks just three weeks before a crucial NATO summit.

Colleagues from Steinmeier’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) sprang to his defense, repeating peace mantras from the days of party legend Willy Brandt, who as West German chancellor pushed detente with the Soviet Union through his Ostpolitik. Words of support echoed from the opposition Greens and Left Party. To top things off, news trickled out that Sigmar Gabriel, who wears the hats of vice chancellor, economy minister, and SPD chief, was planning his second trip to see Russian President Vladimir Putin in less than a year.

Merkel, a Christian Democrat (CDU), and Steinmeier, have a curious division of labor in their coalition government: the chancellor sets foreign policy while her foreign minister busies himself with daily diplomacy. Merkel, not Steinmeier, owns the Minsk peace process in eastern Ukraine, and she was the mastermind behind a controversial deal with Turkey on sending back boat people washing up onto Greece’s shores. Steinmeier seems more interested in analyzing how his own ministry works than making bold initiatives.

That is what made Steinmeier’s criticism of NATO so unusual — and indicated that it had more to do with party politicking than a new direction in German foreign policy. The CDU’s junior partner in the second “grand coalition” since 2005, Social Democrats have struggled to be seen as anything more than Merkel’s little helpers. Voters punished the SPD in recent regional elections, and Germany’s storied workersʼ party is now hovering just above the twenty percent-mark in national polls.

Looming Elections

With the next general elections due in September 2017, the most likely way the SPD could break out of the CDU’s embrace is by heading a “red-red-green” coalition with the Left Party and Greens. Cue the SPD’s most popular politician to use Cold War language the party faithful will recognize. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of Germans think Steinmeier would make a good SPD candidate for chancellor next year, while only 31 percent believe the same about party chief Gabriel.

On the surface, Steinmeier’s jab at NATO looks like the handiwork of Gabriel, who is under increasing pressure within the party to start working miracles. But on closer examination, the renewed calls for rapprochement with the Kremlin two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bear the fingerprints of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who still pulls considerable weight inside the SPD. Steinmeier started his political career as an aide to Schröder, then premier of Lower Saxony, and followed him into the Federal Chancellery as chief of staff. Gabriel filled the premier’s seat in Lower Saxony before moving into national politics.

Schröder has largely vanished from public life after reaping scorn for his undying friendship with Putin and his job at Nord Stream, a Russian pipeline project he had advocated as chancellor. But on the same weekend that German tabloid Bild printed Steinmeier’s “saber-rattling” comments, the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung ran a rare interview with Schröder. Seventy-five years after the Nazis’ attack on the Soviet Union, Schröder said, it was a mistake to station additional NATO troops in Eastern Europe. “We Germans have a special responsibility toward Russia,” he said. Willy Brandt’s success in bringing redemption to Germany via Ostpolitik shouldn’t be “gambled away.”

Schröder’s comments are not really surprising; they reflect SPD orthodoxy since 1989. Germany’s Social Democrats have largely attributed the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ostpolitik, which established the economic ties that made the later political transformation of the Soviet bloc possible. Brandt’s contribution was undeniably outsized. But the fact that today’s SPD can only recycle a forty-year-old policy in response to the new challenges posed by Putin’s Russia shows that the party leadership is stuck in the past.

Willful Misreading

Brandt’s legacy is preventing his political heirs from thinking big and new. In a speech delivered in late June, Steinmeier lauded Germany’s ability to understand other nations and questioned why the term Russland-Versteher — someone who understands Russia — had become an insult. It is hard to say whether the foreign minister was being disingenuous or naive. Schröder’s defense of the Kremlin does not stem from any profound knowledge of Russia as much as a willful misreading of the nasty nature of Putin’s regime.

In the speech, Steinmeier called Germany an “honest broker,” basking in a Swiss-style neutrality that was appropriate in the decades after World War II. Russia and Syria have become so difficult to deal with not because other Western powers are unwilling to sit down and talk, but because Moscow and Damascus make no bones about putting military solutions before political ones.

In an article in Foreign Affairs, Steinmeier had the opportunity to tell the world what to expect from Berlin after spending more than a year on an internal review of German foreign policy. Instead, he soberly described the sad state of the world and explained why Germany sees itself as a “reflective power” focused on “restraint, deliberation, and peaceful negotiation.” There’s nothing wrong with Steinmeier’s analysis, it’s just that a German foreign minister should be proposing a plan of action – or, at the very least, a list of priorities.

“Germans do not believe that talking at roundtables solves every problem, but neither do they think that shooting does,” Steinmeier wrote. This kind of binary worldview inevitably forces him to choose “dialogue.” Even more wishy-washy was his conclusion: “Germany will be a responsible, restrained, and reflective leader, guided in chief by its European instincts.”

Steinmeier is wrong: Germany should be guided by human beings of sound mind. The Brexit vote showed that instincts are an unreliable guide, and that the commitment to European ideals is a conscious decision grounded in history and rationality.

Lessons of Brexit

Ironically, Brexit will also make Berlin even more important in determining Europe’s direction as London’s influence evaporates. At the same time, Germany needs the EU more than ever, because without the clout of the 27-member union, it becomes just another middling power.

On Brexit, as on Russia, Steinmeier went his own way without consulting Merkel. The day after the referendum, he invited his colleagues from the five other founding EU member states to Berlin — in line with Schröder’s concept of a “two-speed” Europe. Ignoring the SPD’s calls for a swift British departure from the EU to prevent the Brexit contagion from spreading to other countries, Merkel voiced support for a measured response so as not to hurt one of Germany’s most important trading partners.

The SPD could well take a lesson from British politicians, who by trying to play domestic politics on the back of foreign policy turned a storm in a teacup into an international crisis.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – July/August 2016 issue.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Turkey can’t stay out of the headlines in Germany. Last week the German parliament debated a resolution calling the 1915 massacre of more than a million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire “genocide.” The Bundestag vote was actually supposed to have taken place a year ago – on the centenary of the tragic events – but was shelved for fear of damaging relations with Ankara. Today that relationship is even more fraught, with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s eleventh-hour deal to stop the flow of refugees to the EU hinging on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s cooperation, who rules Turkey ever more autocratically.

Merkel may have seen the symbolic resolution as a way of answering her manifold critics, who have accused her of abandoning democratic values and cozying up to Erdogan. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, together with their Social Democratic coalition partners and the opposition Greens, sponsored the bill that drew noisy protests not only from official Ankara but also from Germany’s sizable Turkish community.

When Merkel called Binali Yildirim to congratulate him on his new post as Turkey’s prime minister, he used the opportunity to lambaste the upcoming resolution, Der Spiegel reported. Aydan Özoguz, the German government’s commissioner on integration and of Turkish descent, complained to ARD TV that the vote would “shut doors” rather than open them.

In the June 2 parliamentary debate, which really wasn’t one, one speaker after another backed the bill, arguing that Germany, as Turkey’s ally in World War I, carried indirect responsibility for the fate of the Armenians. “We submitted this bill not because we feel morally superior or want to meddle in others’ affairs, but because this is also part of German history,” said Greens leader Cem Özdemir, the son of Turkish immigrants. The Left Party’s Gregor Gysi rattled off a list of countries that had already passed similar resolutions and skewered Merkel, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier for skipping the vote. The resolution passed almost unanimously, with one “nay” and one abstention.

“Idiotic Politicians”

The international news cycle briefly churned over the story as Erdogan recalled his ambassador to Berlin and a top German diplomat was called into the Foreign Ministry in Ankara. Vice News discarded decorum and got straight to the point: “Turkey is super pissed.”

The reaction in pro-government Turkish media was furious. The Star newspaper ran a picture of Merkel with her name printed above her mouth in the shape of a Hitler mustache. “Germany surrenders to populism” was the headline of an editorial in Daily Sabah. “Exploiting the memory of Ottoman Armenians was a welcome distraction for German politicians,” the editors wrote. Merkel would now have to “clean up after her country’s idiotic politicians.”

The first official responses were more muted. Yildirim relativized the Bundestag resolution by pointing out that only 250 of 650 MPs had turned out for the vote. “No one should expect a full worsening of our relationship with Germany because of this kind of a decision,” he said, according to Hürriyet Daily News.

Erdogan, traveling in Africa, told Turkish media that the genocide bill was of “no importance.” He said that Turkey was the target of a German conspiracy and wondered aloud why Merkel couldn’t control her own party in parliament. “Acting in anger is unworthy of us,” Daily Sabah quoted Erdogan as saying. He appeared to separate his bilateral beef with Germany from the refugee deal, which was agreed in March between the EU and Turkey.

The Turkish president also questioned the timing of the Bundestag resolution. In a poll commissioned by ARD, 46 percent of Germans seemed to agree with him, saying they couldn’t understand why German politicians were occupying themselves with the mass killings of Armenians 100 years ago. But 74 percent still supported the wording of the bill, and 91 percent said they didn’t consider Turkey “a trustworthy partner,” up 12 points from April.

If the Armenian resolution was a ploy to distance Merkel from Erdogan, then nobody appears to have consulted Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen. According to Der Spiegel, von der Leyen now has to fret about a planned expansion of Germany’s presence at Incirlik Air Base and the NATO naval patrols fighting human traffickers off Turkey’s coast.

With their Armenian genocide bill passed, Bundestag MPs have inadvertently drawn attention to another forgotten atrocity: the mass killings of the Herero and Nama peoples in German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia, at the beginning of the 20th century. “A recognition of German colonial crimes must follow if we don’t want to strengthen the accusation that this is actually cheap Turkey-bashing,” historian Jürgen Zimmerer wrote in Die Tageszeitung (taz).

The satirical Heute Show picked  up on the subject, lampooning German MPs who in the past have rejected recognizing a “genocide” of the Herero and Nama peoples because of possible reparation claims. “At least for the Turks it’s about honor, while the Germans just want to save money,” said comic Christine Prayon.

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The euphemism for an emergency refugee processing center made its sudden debut in eurospeak in May 2015. The obfuscating misuse of the English term is troubling not least because “hot spot” previously referred to the kind of place refugees are escaping.

© Artwork: Dominik Herrmann

Weird things happen to the English language in Brussels. Even as the EU has accepted English as its lingua franca, the bureaucratese that gets churned out of Europe’s largest sausage factory often has native speakers scratching their heads – take “actorness” or “planification,” for example.

A few years ago, one translator in Brussels started publishing a helpful guide called Misused English Words and Expressions in EU Publications. Given the weight of Germany and France in the EU, Teutonisms and Gallicisms are the worst offenders. That eurocrats do not fully grasp the meaning of “important”, “punctual”, or “coherent” may not come as a surprise. But that they are also struggling with the correct usage of “agenda” and “of” is troubling, to say the least. …

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – May/June 2016 issue.

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