Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath
by Paul Berman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Paul BermanForeword: Richard Holbrooke
Edition: Paperback
Published: 2007-04-16
ISBN: 0393330214
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Book Reviews of Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath
Book Review: The New Left's Burden?
Summary: 3 Stars
There are few books in English on contemporary European affairs; search for "Joschka Fischer" in Amazon.Com, and you'll find only this book in English (another, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany is not yet available).
While books about continental politics are few and far between, "Power and the Idealists" belong to another genre, of which there are many recent specimens. These are about the challenges of the Left in the modern world: with the collapse of the USSR -even before it - traditional leftist found themselves in a new world, where traditional orientations and slogans (Imperialism, Colonialism) seem increasingly irrelevant, and new realities and concepts (Islamism, Humanitarian Intervention) make some of them into uncomfortable bedfellows of those who "only yesterday" were the enemies - the US, Capitalists, NATO.
Various books deal with different Leftists or former leftists and these kinds of challenges: James Naughtie's The Accidental American is about Tony Blair and his strange alliance with Bush. Nick Cohen's What's Left? argues that the Left is lost in cynicism and moral relativism. The early parts of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq deal with Leftist illusions and disillusions past and present; From the Neo-Conservatives to the Liberal Hawks. Paul Berman's is probably the most compelling of the bunch.
Berman's heroes, like the subjects of these other books, follow roughly the same path, typified by Joschka Fischer's. They start as Leftist radicals (to a greater or lesser extent), with extreme and not always coherent views of justice and goodness and equality. They want to transform society, they dream of resistance to Fascism, Imperialism, and their earthly champion, America. They adore Che Guevara, and while they do not support the violence of the Baader Meinhoff gang, they are not too concerned with it; All are fighting the good fight, after all, even if some are misguided, even terribly misguided, in how they do it. Fischer even went as far as beating a policeman, and getting caught on camera, leading to a scandal when the pictures surfaced some thirty years later.
Somewhere along the line comes disillusionment. For Fischer, it was Entebbe, when Palestinian terrorists and their German allies not only abducted a plane and threatened to kill its passengers; they also divided them into Jews and Gentiles, releasing the latter while keeping the former captive. For a Leftist like Fischer, the echoes of the Holocaust were too eerie.
Disillusionment had many triggers. For some it was the events in Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese, after vanquishing America, turned against their own people in massacres far worse than My Lai. It might have been watching Che Guevara a little bit too close for comfort; the revolutionary hero was far from what most Leftists made of him.
The realization that the West was not invariably wrong, and that its power could be used for good was dramatic. Berman's heroes (he calls them the 68ers, for a generation shaped by the events of the late 60s and early 70s), as they grew and as some of them came to power, brought their ideals into actions, including military action. They wanted to defend human rights and prevent atrocities, by gunpoint if necessary. The Kosovo War had arguably been their finest hour - a humanitarian effort in which NATO soldiers fought not to further traditional realpolitik ends, but to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
... And the war came. The Iraq war confronted the 68ers with a dilemma. They liked George W. Bush not one bit. Everything about the vulgar American rubbed them the wrong way. They disliked and distrusted his justification for war. But they abhorred Saddam Hussein. Thus the Iraq War saw a fault line in the 68 generation, when the unity of this New Left was shattered: some of them supported the US administrations -while others tried to find a path that would allow them to oppose the war and the administration without supporting its enemies.
Berman presents the failure of the Iraq adventure as a consequence of the supreme incompetence of the American administration, and of lack of support from European nation, especially France (p.257). Nowhere does Berman consider the possibility that the task was too onerous. The Law of Unintentional Consequences has no place in Berman's account, nor does he have any doubt of the capacity of an effective policy to solve Iraq's (and the world's) problems. Berman and his heroes have had many disillusions, but they were not disillusioned of the power of technocracy. The idea that there may be limits to the statist policies doesn't seem to have crossed Berman's mind.
A related problem: the treatment of Islam. The chapter of Islam is viewed through the writing of Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) and of course Kanan Makiya (author of the anti-Baath Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition; No book of this genre is complete without him). When Berman looks at extreme Islam, all he sees is a Totalitarian system, a western ideology in eastern clothing. I think this is an important insight, but a very partial one; there's something seriously wrong with a discussion of radical Islam that pays more attention to Hannah Arendt then to the prophet Muhammad.
This is a general problem with Berman's humanitarians: how little these would be saviors know about the world they would save! Berman's account of Western thought and politics is deep and insightful; His commentary on the rest of the world is shallow and clich?d.
And Berman hardly reflects on how familiar the Interventionist Left seems to those who remember the past. Berman's history starts in the 1940s, but the Leftist quest reminds one of a much older tradition, an earlier generation of Westerners who sought to save the rest of humanity. "Take up the White Man's burden" Kipling wrote in 1899 "The Savage Wars of Peace/Fill Full the Mouth of Famine/and bid the sickness cease ... "
And yet... the Kosovo War did stop the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population, and did dispose of Slobodan Milosevic, didn't it? And so, perhaps...?
Summary of Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath
The author of the best-selling Terror and Liberalism on the rise to power of the generation of 1968.The student uprisings of 1968 erupted not only in America but also across Europe, expressing a distinct generational attitude about politics, the corrupt nature of democratic capitalism, and the evil of military interventions. Yet, thirty-five years later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a cop to the ground; during the 1990s, he was supporting Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans.
Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), masterfully traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation—and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.
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