© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Germany’s Green Party has foreign policy built into its DNA. The main impulse that led to its foundation more than 40 years ago was the protection of the environment: the global challenge par excellence. Many core issues of Green politics are global and are treated as such: the pursuit of civil liberties and an open, multicultural society, the struggle for human rights and democracy, which can only succeed if these values are shared by as many people and countries as possible, and, not least, the quest for a more equal distribution of wealth and opportunities on a global scale.

The big question of course is how these goals can be achieved. Countless times the party has discussed the policy consequences of its founding tenets, most ardently how to interpret the principle of nonviolence in the light of international crises and mass atrocities.

An overarching understanding has emerged over the last 20 years: we have defined the European Union as the model and the basis of our foreign policy.  The EU is the most successful attempt yet to move beyond national boundaries, to leave behind years of bitter and often violent enmities, to help create freedom and prosperity, and to forge an albeit imperfect consensus on the shared values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. German foreign policy must therefore always be conceived as part of a European foreign policy.

Reforming the UN

We aim to strengthen the rules-based international order under the auspices of the United Nations. With the goal of transforming foreign policy into global domestic policy, we want to reform the workings of the UN. To succeed, the UN and other international organizations must ultimately shed structures that perpetuate power balances dating from the post-World War II era. Yet to achieve this reform we must strengthen the UN—despite its many shortcomings. If we want the power of law instead of the law of the powerful, the UN is the only way to move forward.

For example, the idea of the responsibility to protect is one of the steps on the way to protecting the powerless. It demands that the international community shield those whose own governments cannot or will not defend them from the most egregious forms of violence, first and foremost by political means, but in extreme cases also by military force. Of course, we as Greens have to come to terms with the serious blows this idea has suffered for example in Syria, where the UN Security Council, blocked and unable to act, has once again shirked its responsibility to keep the peace.

Peace and Democracy

Green foreign policy assumes that international peace and the strengthening of democratic values go hand in hand. Today, however, we have to deal with challenges to both peace and democracy. Even in Europe, which we once believed to be a safe haven for democracy and the rule of law, authoritarian movements have been on the rise for the past decade. Paradoxically, these nationalist movements that target the universality of human rights and undermine international rules have quite an outreach. Leaders like Matteo Salvini and Vladimir Putin essentially speak the same language, the one funding the other.

These movements cannot be countered by adopting their language and concerns. A clear commitment to international cooperation, to social and ecological justice, and to the principles of human rights are the only way to win the argument. This includes a clear stance on one of the most contentious issues: migration. In an ever more interconnected world, the idea of closing our borders in order to maintain ethnically homogeneous nation states is clearly absurd. A pragmatic migration policy must take economic, political, and humanitarian aspects into account. It must serve each country’s economic interests, but not exclusively so.

Effective Asylum Systems

Migration policy also has to protect European states from blackmail attempts by authoritarian leaders in Africa and the Middle East who play on the fear of mass migration. They offer to stop migration; in return, Europe is meant to close its eyes to their abusive and authoritarian rule. Their politics, however, are not in our interest. And if we are willing to accept a certain number of migrants from their countries, their threats quickly dissipate. Of course, keeping up the principles of the Geneva Convention is another cornerstone of the values-based approach to foreign policy. The tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea, which we have been witnessing for years now, puts European values to shame. We urgently need a coordinated effort for the rescue and distribution of these migrants and refugees as well as an effective asylum system to decide who can benefit from humanitarian protection.

Diplomacy, civil crisis prevention, as well as economic development are some of the most important tools of such a foreign policy. If Germany and Europe want to take more responsibility on the international stage, we must strengthen our capacities in these fields. This particularly regards the German Foreign Office, which is notoriously understaffed and underfunded.

A Common European Defense

Yet as we have painfully learned, peaceful means are often not enough to keep violent conflict at bay and prevent mass atrocities. In some cases, a military intervention by the international community or parts thereof is necessary as a means of last resort to create space for diplomacy and other civilian efforts.

This means maintaining a capable and efficient military force. Yet arbitrary spending goals, such as NATO’s much-discussed two-percent goal, do not constitute reliable benchmarks. It is far more important to combine forces with our European partners to make our common defense more effective. A similar argument applies to arms exports. Selling weapons to states involved in armed conflicts or human rights abuses on a massive scale may contribute to lowering the price for armaments needed in Europe. However, apart from the obvious moral fallacy of this argument, the political and economic costs of the conflicts fuelled by these weapons in the long term far outweigh any minor gain in the short term.

Reducing Global Inequality

The challenges that our planet is facing are immense. Climate change is the most existential and pressing. But it cannot be addressed in isolation. The changes it requires to many of our habits can only be achieved politically if we can achieve a more equitable distribution of global wealth. This is an integral part of foreign policy. It includes an overhaul of the policies of institutions such as the IMF and a rethinking of international trade relations. Global trade must be organized in a way that reduces rather than exacerbates inequality. European agricultural subsidies, for example, distort agricultural markets in Africa and the Middle East and keep these countries from opening their markets in a way that would benefit both sides.

Climate change is not the only development that has a profound impact on international relations. The new era of digital communication has also changed the traditional role of states in foreign policy. This gives renewed importance to an approach we Greens have favored for a long time: a deepened engagement with civil societies all over the world, both digitally and physically, and a commitment to their freedom of action. The ties resulting from such policies are essential to overcoming many an impasse encountered on other levels.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Robert Habeck would hate this article. Or at least he would say he does. The high-flying head of the German Green party, aware that nothing kills a politician’s career quicker than hype, often appears to be deflecting his popularity. But in these past few months, no other political figure has caught the attention of Germany’s media more effectively than the smooth and casual 49-year-old intellectual from the Danish borderlands.

Habeck’s slightly grumpy charisma is infectious. The weekly carousel of German political talkshows (Anne Will, Maybrit Illner, Maischberger and hart aber fair) can’t get enough of his unshaven, tousle-haired charm: a count by the newspaper network RND found that in 2018, Habeck made the most appearances on the four TV staples of any German politician: 13 in all.

As if all that publicity weren’t enough, just last month he was anointed “politician of the year,” along with Green party co-leader Annalena Baerbock, by Politik & Kommunikation, a media trade magazine that felt the need to celebrate the pair after the Green party’s spectacular autumn. In October’s state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the left-liberal environmentalists carved large slices out of the two major political parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the tailspinning Social Democratic Party (SPD), and made themselves the second-biggest force in both state parliaments.

Don’t Call Us a Volkspartei

Politik & Kommunikation’s laudatory editors said that, under Habeck and Baerbock, the Greens were “on the way to becoming a Volkspartei.” But that word, meant to invoke an exalted status, might have set Habeck’s teeth on edge. Literally “people’s party,” a Volkspartei is what Germans like to call the CDU and the SPD, the pragmatic centrists that encompass swathes of sensible citizens from many social strata. For decades, the two parties could put as much as 80 percent of the electorate under their umbrellas, steering Germany across a serene ocean of Realpolitik.

But things have changed. The political landscape is flattening out as people disperse to different camps. Established broad churches aren’t providing the succour they once did, and apart from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), no one appears to have benefited from this fragmentation more than the Greens. This is not to say that German voters have become deranged idealists chasing populist visions, but it does mean that Merkel’s political bloc no longer has a monopoly on conservatism. That became most clear in the aftermath of the Bavarian election, when surveys found that, as well as the 200,000 votes the Greens had stolen from the Social Democrats, the Greens had poached some 170,000 from the Christian Social Union (CSU).

This is significant: tens of thousands of people who had previously identified with an overwhelmingly Catholic conservative party with a hardline anti-immigration stance shifted to a former protest party with an ecological, migration-friendly agenda. The CSU’s election campaign, much like its governing policy in Bavaria for the past three years, was a desperate attempt to head off the threat from the AfD by relentlessly attacking Merkel for letting in too many refugees. That allowed the Greens to appear reasonable, to insist on the rule of law, and allowed the conservative Bavarian voter to find a serious alternative without having to associate with the stuffy leftism of the Social Democrats and (God forbid) Die Linke.

This isn’t all Habeck’s doing, obviously, but he is alert enough to believe that this is why, even though the Greens have now overtaken the SPD in the polls, a Volkspartei is exactly what he doesn’t want them to become—or be seen as becoming. In a society divided and (very slowly) bringing its diversity into its politics, the idea that a substantial part of the population will identify with any major political party is emphatically dead. The basic math supports the point: the Christian Democrats are only just clearing the 30-percent mark, and the Social Democrats can barely muster 15 percent of voters (as late-January polls show)—in other words, the political center can no longer count on the majority of the population.

When explaining this, Habeck occasionally coughs up a soundbite that flirts with meaninglessness, (“We don’t need the lowest common denominator, we need higher common goals,” he told one public broadcaster), but it speaks of optimism and strategic acumen that he sees this growing instability as an opportunity. “Volatility also means there’s a fair chance of winning majorities,” he told Der Spiegel magazine in December. “The loss of old certainties is at the same time the winning of new possibilities.”

Only Squares Join a Party

Habeck also appears to be alive to another aspect of this fragmentation. The whole idea of a political party, with its formalities, hierarchies, and laboriously set-out agendas is starting to weary voters, and German politicians are beginning to do what might be called the Emmanuel Macron En Marche thing: play the anti-elitist outsider and start a political movement from scratch. The most obvious parallel in Germany is the socialist Aufstehen organization, started by Sahra Wagenknecht, who has somehow managed to remain Die Linke’s party leader.

Habeck has ruled out going that far, but his interactions with the Green party suggest that he is carefully nurturing an aura of independence. He’s quite open about technological advances in agriculture, for instance, even if that defies traditional party wisdom.

This much is reflected in his precipitous rise: the son of pharmacists, Habeck grew up in Heikendorf, outside the port city of Kiel. Apart from marrying and raising children, he spent the 1990s producing literary translations, partly in Denmark, and writing a doctorate on literary aesthetics. But by the time he reached his 30s, he switched track. In 2002, he joined the Green party, and by 2004 he was its leader in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein. Even as he ascended the ranks—by 2012 he was the state’s minister for agriculture and environment—he continued as an author, publishing novels together with his wife Andrea Paluch and non-fiction that largely reflected his undergraduate passion for philosophy.

His most recent book, Wer wir sein könnten (“Who we could be”) from October 2018, examines the relations between democratic and totalitarian language, but his 2010 work Patriotismus: Ein linkes Plädoyer (“Patriotism—a left-wing appeal”) might be a better clue to understanding Habeck. It reads as an earnest and pragmatic attempt to reconcile the looming political splits that occurred in the second half of this decade. Still, a vestige of this approach is noticeable in the tour of Germany Habeck undertook last summer, during which, between political engagements, he visited spots that marked milestones in Germany’s path to democracy, such as the Hambacher Schloss, opening debates on how to “own” a left-liberal patriotic mythology.

A Serious Faux-Pas

Such noises have inevitably stirred unrest among the Green party’s ranks, though Habeck and Baerbock’s successes mean they have walked that awkward tightrope well: keeping the core voters on their side while reaching out beyond. For one reason or another, the Greens appear to be the only German party that is not either desperately searching for a new direction or in open conflict with itself. In fact, Habeck’s air of independence, and his close cooperation with Baerbock, have managed to quell the endless conflict between the party’s conservative “realos” and its left-wing “idealos”. For what it’s worth, Habeck is definitely a “realo”: he brought the Green party into coalition with the CDU and the neo-liberal Free Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein, but he’s still in favor of a basic income, or at least ending sanctions on Hartz IV unemployment benefits.

But the bigger test to that inner harmony will come this autumn, when three elections in Germany’s least Green-friendly regions loom: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. The omens so far are not good: Thuringia was the scene of Habeck’s biggest mistake to date in early January, which resulted in his rather drastic renunciation of social media. In a video tweeted by the state’s Green party, Habeck told voters that his party “would do everything to make sure Thuringia becomes an open, free, liberal, and democratic state.”

It was an impromptu video message delivered in a noisy conference room, but that “becomes” was a significant faux pas: a grave insult to Thuringians, made worse by the fact that the Greens already are in the state’s government. Habeck’s statement also played to the prejudice that many Germans have about the Greens: that they are urban smart-asses who want to tell you what to do. For a second, Habeck’s composure, and his ability to speak to non-Green party voters, had slipped. It might yet prove a fateful signal.

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© REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Ms. Beck, a computer in your office was hacked in 2014. How did you find out? The German Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI, informed me of suspicious activities they had observed in reference to a computer in my office, and they asked me whether I’d allow them to check the computer in question, which of course I did. I was subsequently informed that the computer had been hacked and malware then known as MiniDuke had been used. I had to find out via Google searches that MiniDuke had been used in the past, against smaller Eastern European countries and US think tanks among other targets. The hacking incident was confirmed to me by Petra Pau, vice president of the German Bundestag from the Left Party, who is in charge of informational security. And that was that. File closed.

MiniDuke was suspected to be of Russian origin even back then. The fact that it targeted a German representative known for her critical views of Vladimir Putin and her support for democrats and opposition figures in countries like Ukraine or Georgia was potentially explosive. Why was the case dealt with so slowly? Several reasons, I presume. First, there’s the legal aspect. No public statement can be issued as long as there is no clear evidence about the origin of the malware. Then there is the fact that Bundestag members and its presidium may have underestimated how determined the intelligence services of an authoritarian state can be when trying to obtain information about German representatives – which would also give them access to foreign activists in contact with those representatives. This is of course highly dangerous in countries where opposition forces face serious repression. And last but not least: There seems to be a far greater outcry over digital spying activities by the United States in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden than over hacking attacks from authoritarian states.

With recent reports on Russian interference in the US-election campaign, do you think this has changed now? You know, I have learnt to my surprise that the attack on my office was conducted by the same group that seems to be responsible for the attack on the Clinton campaign – the FSB-controlled hacking group CozyBear, or ATP29. And to my even greater surprise I was not informed about that by the German Bundestag, but by a US news channel.

 How so? NBC contacted me and claimed to have been informed by the BSI press office. I then inquired with Ministry for the Interior, which supervises the BSI, why the office would inform a US news channel but not the parliamentarian who was directly affected. The BSI denied having informed NBC, but told me subsequently that they now had the technical means to learn more about MiniDuke and were now sure that the 2014 attack on my office computer was conducted by CozyBear. At the same time, the BSI stressed that it wasn’t within their remit to identify who was responsible for the hacking; that would be the task of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service. The BfV then confirmed to me that they believe the Russian intelligence service to be responsible. Legally, however, this is considered still insufficient, i.e. the evidence does not allow a clear attribution in a legal sense.

Is the latest US intelligence report on Russian interference in the US presidential elections helpful in this regard – and will it raise general awareness? To be honest, I don’t think so. There’s still insufficient awareness of the political context of those hacks. One reason might be that too many still cannot imagine that the information that could be obtained would be of any interest to the Russian side. Also, most still vastly underestimate the sophisticated network for hacking and manipulating public opinion that Russia has established in Germany. In my political work, I come across so much political engineering. And the massive activity of trolls was underestimated for a long time – or not even recognized as troll activity. For far too long, their activities were thought to be a genuine expression of dissatisfaction with the reporting by German media about the invasion of eastern Ukraine, or a supposedly too critical attitude toward Russia.

Aside from the trolls who flooded the so-called “established media” with comments immediately after the annexation of Crimea, do you see “homegrown activities” as well? Take the so-called “Monday demonstrations”, supposedly in the tradition of the “Monday demonstrations” against the Communist East German government in 1989:  In 2004, they started as left-wing protests against social injustices in the eastern city of Leipzig, but in the wake of the Ukraine conflict in spring 2014 they transformed into aggressive, right-wing, xenophobic, populist demonstrations under the umbrella “Vigils for Peace.” It’s interesting to note that Jürgen Elsässer, for instance, the editor in chief of Compact magazine, which thrives on pro-Russian conspiracy theories, is a former left winger – a good example for this new “Querfront,” amalgamating the extreme fringes of the left and right. These forces aggressively attacked those who spoke out against Russian aggression in Ukraine as “warmongers” – myself included.

Did the fact that you were defamed with the term “warmonger” also play a role in your recent deselection for the 2017 elections after more than 26 years in the Bundestag?  It would be very hard to prove causality. But it’s true that in some parts of our party – and not the most irrelevant ones – the slur “Beck is a warmonger” took hold, and was spread through social media as well. I was told that in leading circles of the Green party, in my hometown and my constituency in Bremen, there was concern that my candidacy would chase away more left wing voters. There was obviously no urge to support a Green member of the Bundestag who works with Russian and Ukrainian dissidents, with democrats and civil rights activists, in order to send a clear signal. The Russian human rights group Memorial, the democratic “Eurooptimists” forces in the Ukrainian parliament, members of the marginalized Belarusian democratic opposition – they all wrote supporting letters, but they had no effect.

The hackers working for Russian intelligence may have targeted information about your contact with political figures critical of the Putin regime in Ukraine, Georgia, Russia itself, or Chechnya – all regions where you are active. Is there any indication that those activists were harmed? I’d be devastated if I personally would have put people in danger in those countries or regions.  So far I can say that this hasn’t happened – yet. I can say, however, that Natalya Estemirova, whom I knew very well and whom I supported in her struggle against Ramsan Kadyrov, was brutally murdered in 2009. I sincerely hope that it was not our communication that had put her in danger. Her murder has never been solved, by the way.

Why do you think Russian interference so far has caused much less of a stir than the revelations about the NSA spying activities? The rational explanation may be that it is more outrageous, of course, to be betrayed by friends, namely the US. But I believe it has much more to do with deep anti-Western sentiments – anti-modern, anti-representative democracy, anti-capitalist, anti-homosexuality, etc. These feelings are to be found both on the right and left fringes of our society. In polls, we see almost equal sympathy, or even support, for Putin’s policy or his persona among voters of the Left Party and the right wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The latter prefers a “strong leadership” to the consensus-seeking work of parliaments, demands protectionism as a tool against globalization, wants to return to old social patterns, to traditional “family values”, to homophobia. In short, they are longing for a less complex, almost pre-modern world.  This ideological mix has been promoted by the Kremlin for a long time, and has found resonance among both left- and right-wings fringes – and it should worry the left greatly that it also finds resonance in their own camp.

Do you think that the German public will show “democratic resilience” against this ideological onslaught? I very much hope that Germany’s middle-class center, its bürgerliche Mitte, will hold. It clearly gets dangerous when the center starts to crack. We therefore need policies that strengthens the center regardless of our political differences. “We”, the center, may fight over the necessity of humanitarian interventions, of employing military means, but we are united in the conviction that we need to deal with the complexities of modernity in a complex way – and that simple “truths” or “solutions” based on fear-mongering are not the right answers.

Marieluise Beck was one of the founders of the Green party, and first entered the Bundestag in 1983. In her work on foreign affairs she has played an important role in supporting opposition figures and democratic forces in Eastern Europe and Russia. With her deselection, the Bundestag will lose one of its most vocal critics of Vladimir Putin.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2017 issue.

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