Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping called the decision "absolutely wrong." When he heard the news, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was in Stockholm meeting with Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh. "It's the wrong signal", said Fischer, and both ministers expressed their "deep disappointment".
Just last week, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder co-signed an editorial in the "New York Times" with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac calling on the Senate to ratify the treaty. But as Peter De Thier writes in the "Berliner Zeitung", "No one should have any illusions; the worldwide indignation will have no effect." Pointing to the political motives behind the decision which US President Clinton has himself called "partisan" and "reckless", De Thier adds, "The gentlemen of the Senate won't be interested for a second that they've maneuvered the country into international isolation."
While Senate voted down ratification on Wednesday night and political leaders around the world voiced their shocked disapproval all day Thursday, Friday was the day the world's editors registered their dismay and disdain, and the German papers were no exception. In the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", Klaus Brill dismisses treaty opponents' fears that the agreement could not be enforced as a matter of technical feasibility or that nations such as North Korea or Iraq would ignore the treaty anyway. "They simply wanted to knock a foreign policy success out of the President Clinton's hands for pure political reasons." The damage will be immense, Brill continues, as reactions from NATO allies have already shown. "How will the US government now possibly persuade Russia and China to ratify a test ban treaty or any other nuclear agreement?"
Nearly all the German papers offer a quick historical overview of the nuclear debate in the US, pointing to initiatives and pleas for a test ban from both Republican President Eisenhower and President Kennedy, a Democrat. Writing in the leftish "Tageszeitung", Götz Neuneck repeats the refrain of repulsion over the pettiness of the Senate's move: "The Republicans wanted one thing only: To damage Bill Clinton." Neuneck concludes with a dash of drama: "By the way: The last international treaty the US failed to ratify was the Versailles Treaty of 1920... World War II followed."
In the "Frankfurter Rundschau", Jochen Siemens refers to Versailles as well (and dates it 1919, too), but isn't quite as sensational. His argument is straightforward: "The Senate has driven a wedge between the US and its NATO allies, delivered arguments to wannabe nuclear powers and damaged the reputation of the US."
Germany and Europe on the Web today:
With Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in attendance, DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (Dasa) of Germany and Aérospatiale Matra of France announced a merger of their aerospace businesses on Thursday in Strasbourg, France. With combined sales of $22 billion, the new European Aeronautic, Defense and Space Company (EADS) becomes the third-largest aerospace company in the world after the Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Tony Major and Alexander Nicoll outline the basics of the deal in the "Financial Times", analyse its potential effect on British Aerospace and trace the "secret route to the deal." Free registration required
"But the deal is at least as important for political and military as for business reasons," writes Edmund L. Andrews in the "New York Times": "It marks the first major cross-border merger within Europe's balkanized military industry and demonstrated the galvanizing effect of the Kosovo war on European military thinking." Free registration required
"The president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, challenged European Union governments Wednesday to accept a 'bold and imaginative' program to take in new members and unite the Continent 'for the first time since the fall of the Roman empire.'" Barry James reports in the "International Herald Tribune" on Prodi's recommendation that Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Malta be added to the list of candidates for EU membership. As Stephen Bates writes in the "Guardian", "The move could see the EU's 15 members expand to 27 in the next decade or so, stretching the union from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Black Sea, a zone of 500m people." Free registration required for the "Guardian"
"Herr Lafontaine's grand reckoning with Gerhard Schröder has been so exhaustively serialised and exposed that there were few secrets left to sell, but a book launch is a book launch and Herr Lafontaine is nothing if not a showman." Roger Boyes pulls no punches in his review for the "Times" of London of the former finance minister's presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday, going so far as to argue that not only has "Red Oskar" already lost his grudge match with the chancellor, he's ruined the left wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as well. In his report for the "Financial Times", Haig Simonian refers to Lafontaine's DM700,000 ($384,000) advance from the Econ Ullstein List publishing house: "'Being concerned with social justice doesn't mean one should renounce personal income,' the fiery leftwinger replied to a pointed question about his moral values." Free registration required for the "FT"
Also in the "FT": Tony Major explains why shares in the German business software group SAP plunged 10 percent on Wednesday and elaborates on the effect of the Y2K scare on the company's sales. Ralph Atkins and Haig Simonian report on the German government's sluggish reaction to a study urging liberalization of laws determining when stores may and may not open. And Sarah Althaus on Deutsche Telekom's rejection of Mannesmann's bid for DT's cable TV network. Free registration required
John Schmid writes in the "International Herald Tribune" that Chancellor Schröder "has a reputation for political zigzags throughout his career and his yearlong stewardship of the chancellery," and points to two "U-turns" as evidence: The SPD's endorsement this week of both the "wealth tax" and union proposals to lower the age of retirement to 60.
Caroline Wyatt sums up Schröder's troubles for the BBC.
Construction workers have bumped into Hitler's underground bunker in Berlin, but there are no plans to either destroy or unearth it, reports Andrew Gimson in the "Daily Telegraph".
In May 1945, US troops intercepted a train in Austria headed for Germany. As Tim Golden reports in the "New York Times", the train was loaded "with the collected wealth of Hungary's decimated Jews. Their wedding bands alone filled crate after crate." And the Americans helped themselves. Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who heads up the US side of the table in negotiations over German firms' compensation for Nazi-era slave labor (see the October 8 "Digest"), says, "We want to establish the principle that the United States is willing to hold itself to the same high standard to which it has held others." The US army "is committed to telling the story" of "the gold train." Free registration required
"Austria's triumphant far-right leader Jörg Haider brought his European offensive to London [Wednesday] night to counter what he called 'prejudice' about his anti-foreigner Freedom party, which narrowly won second place in the country's most dramatic election since 1945." Ian Black and Kate Connolly in the "Guardian" on Haider's diplomatic tour, which didn't go too well earlier in the day in Paris, either. Free registration required
At the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday, the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag announced that it is pulling all hardcover copies of Fragments , an award-winning work in which Binjamin Wilkomirksi writes what he claims is a memoir of his childhood experiences in the concentration camps of Majdnek and Auschwitz. A historian argues that "Wilkomirski had not been a Jewish orphan but a Swiss-born child named Bruno Doessekker." Doreen Carvajal reports in the "New York Times" on what appears to be the beginning of the end of a long, drawn out controversy. Fiachra Gibbons and Stephen Moss tell the story of "one of the great literary deceptions" in the "Guardian". Free registration required
In other Book Fair news, Neil Tweedie reports in the "Daily Telegraph" on a controversial book unveiled in Frankfurt arguing that it was the Germans, not the British, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Also: Will Bennett on the auction of the Moritzburg Treasure and an Electronic Telegraph Gallery exhibit featuring Gerhard Richter.
And finally, a deep read for the weekend. Marcel O'Gorman reviews Friedrich Kittler's Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays in "Postmodern Culture".
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