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  Selling Out Human Rights: The Big Business Chancellor

Selling Out Human Rights The Big Business Chancellor

Trouble is brewing in Germany's coalition government: The chancellor's foreign policy is increasingly being perceived as a brazen attempt to drum up business. Gerhard Schroeder believes increased trade will improve human rights in China, Turkey and Russia, but his critics are deeply skeptical.

This is the way German business leaders like to see their chancellor behave: Gerhard Schroeder spent a good portion of his recent flight to Beijing taking a break from politics to play cards and drink a glass or two of red wine.

To the delight of Schroeder's fellow revelers, Michael Rogowski, the president of the Association of German Industry -- who has proven more than happy to engage in a little relaxed socializing with the chancellor -- felt compelled to take a nap as soon as the plane had landed. While the grim but persistent chancellor hurried off to the Great Hall of the People, Rogowski frankly admitted: "I'm just not feeling up to it."

Despite Rogowski's absence, the chancellor and his entourage managed to rake in billions of euros in Chinese orders for German technology. The Chinese ordered 23 passenger aircraft, 180 locomotives, several power plants and a sewage treatment plant. Chinese editions of a popular German car magazine and a runaway-hit quiz show were also kicked off.

The satisfied chancellor and his entourage raised glasses at the local Kempinski Hotel to celebrate their tremendous business acumen. Siemens CEO Heinrich von Pierer, corporate consultant Roland Berger, steel baron Juergen Grossmann and Christoph Gottschalk, the brother of a well-known German TV personality, expressed their gratitude to Schroeder, their salesman par excellence.

A few days later, Grossmann was still ecstatic: "I wouldn't say it was the deal of the century, but the chancellor is doing great things for the German economy here in China." Then he returned to his card game.

Back in Berlin, members of Germany's governing coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party were curious to know whether Schroeder's fishing expedition to Beijing had included any mention of the status of human rights in China. They didn't hear much. At least not much that could have put their concerns to rest.

Although Schroeder's government has been critical of Beijing's record on human rights, the chancellor seemed to defend the Chinese government against German accusations in his public statements. Schroeder believes that the European Union weapons embargo against China, imposed in June 1989 following the massacre at Tienanmen Square, is outdated and should be lifted.

The chancellor indicated that he acknowledges, with "due respect," the protests from within government ranks in parliament, who had put forward a resolution demanding an extension of the embargo. Schroeder's response to critics at home was that you may be able to export goods, but you can't export Germany's social model.

The most devastating aspect of Schroeder's foreign policy, even to his supporters, is the nonchalant and tactless approach the chancellor has been taking. In his public appearances, there is little evidence of an appropriate sense of distance vis-à-vis foreign leaders, a distance he is certainly capable of maintaining.

Suddenly Putin becomes an "unblemished democrat" and the massacre at Tiananmen Square, which Schroeder calls an "incident of the time," is turned into an historical footnote. By contrast, he shows a complete lack of interest in human rights and democracy movements.

When it comes to choosing between morals and markets, Schroeder has clearly staked out his position. His role is that of the pragmatic proponent of Realpolitik, traveling the world as a representative of the German business community. He measures his successes in terms of the size of orders for German products, and constantly sees "interests to be realized," -- code for German business profits.

Forgotten principles

It's a dramatic departure from the beginnings of the red-green coalition, which, upon assuming power in 1998, promised to make significant changes to the German political landscape -- and that included German foreign policy. Back then, issues such as torture, forced-labor camps and public executions were at the top of the new administration's agenda, and some of its avowed goals included taking more aggressive diplomatic steps to stamp out prickly problems abroad like press censorship and government orders that exclude dissidents and minorities from civil service professions. Back then, Joschka Fischer -- a Green Party member of parliament and now Germany's foreign minister -- pronounced human rights to be the "leitmotif of German policy." The new administration's noble claim was to favor morals over power, principles over profits.

It was a claim that had already evaporated by one of the first cabinet meetings, when the newly minted federal government, against the protests of its own minister of foreign aid, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, decided to extend Germany's loan guarantees for the delivery of Leopard tanks to Turkey. The reason? To secure jobs.

But long forgotten are Fischer's emotional attacks against Germany's conservative administration in 1996, in an appeal to Germans to vote the left-leaning red-green coalition into office: "We will never see peaceful development in China if we focus exclusively on business." Back then, Fischer was still saying that German politicians must be "unyielding" in talking to the Chinese about human rights. Fischer's words, almost a decade ago: "And if we lose business as a result, then we lose business."

Eight years and more than a hundred overseas trips later, there has been a significant shift in tone, at least when Schroeder speaks. Economic interests now overshadow everything else. When the chancellor thinks about Russia and Libya, he's mainly interested in their enormous oil reserves. When he looks to China, he sees the development of the world's biggest market for automobiles. For Schroeder, Turkey's admission to the European Union represents a welcome addition to markets for German goods.

Schroeder says that politicians who spend too much time denouncing policies they don't like are unlikely to achieve their goals. According to Schroeder, it's an approach that can at best produce "headlines for a day."

Perhaps to add a little glamour to his rather humdrum economic goodwill missions, Schroeder has taken to invoking SPD icon Willy Brandt. Brandt's policy of reconciliation with the Soviet bloc, says Schroeder, helped create the conditions for a peaceful competition of political systems. Brandt's strategy for success went down in the history books under the catchy slogan of "change through rapprochement." Schroeder's version is simpler, but the basic concept is the same: "change through trade."

Brandt, mayor of Berlin at the time, and his deputy Egon Bahr wanted to make the Iron Curtain porous. As early as 1962, one year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, the later chancellor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize described the reasoning behind his approach in a famous lecture at Harvard University: It was to stamp out communism.

Political leaders in the west, Brandt said, should try to ride out the Cold War "by means of a relatively constant balancing of interests, until the Soviet leadership abandons its goals or its rule in Russia comes to an end."

Many former dissidents from East Germany and the Eastern European countries disagree. Even now, former dissidents believe they were betrayed and sold down the river by the west's champions of Realpolitik. Many are embittered by the fact that the free world's emissaries usually spoke only with their oppressors.

This is why Polish dissidents, in particular, are at odds with Germany's Social Democrats. They haven't forgotten the day Willy Brandt fell to his knees at the Warsaw ghetto memorial, but they also have trouble forgiving the SPD chairman for later refusing to meet with labor leader Lech Walesa in Poland.

Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl was confronted with similar accusations during his years as chancellor. In 1995, when he visited the 196th infantry division of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, he was rebuked by former East German dissidents Baerbel Bohley and Juergen Fuchs, who referred to his visit as "bowing to the Beijing leadership and its generals."

Then the SPD, the opposition party at the time, chimed in. In a harshly worded critique of the conservative administration, SPD chairman Rudolf Scharping said: "Anyone who turns human rights into an ornament of foreign policy is destroying fundamental principles and the shared objectives we should be advancing." Fellow SPD member Gernot Erler proclaimed: "We refuse to support a foreign policy that refers to human rights issues as an arabesque."

But the time of loud protests has long past.