Germany Makes a Choice, And It Isn't France

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German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a leftist hell-raiser in his youth but today a popular politician, last week visited Washington and offered his views on what the future world order should be. French President Jacques Chirac must have been stunned. The message was that Germany has its own ideas about international politics, and they are precisely the opposite of Mr. Chirac's grand vision of a united Europe that would become a rival to the U.S. for global power.

Mr. Fischer, who met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, said that Germany does not want to be a rival to the U.S. He asserted that Europe can only be strong in cooperation with the U.S., not as a competitor.

By contrast, Mr. Chirac, who can't rid himself of the aspirations to "glory" that Charles de Gaulle implanted in the French psyche in the 1960s, wants the Atlantic alliance to disappear. When German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder employed anti-Americanism in a close campaign for re-election last year, Mr. Chirac thought he saw an opportunity achieve his vision of Europe as a world power. He set about to prove France's political strength by trying to undermine the U.S.-British endeavor to remove Saddam Hussein as a threat to peace. He imagined that a Europe led by Germany and France -- but mostly France -- was finally taking shape.

He was dead wrong. Every member and candidate member of the European Union other than Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg made it clear that they were siding with the Americans. Since Belgium and Luxembourg are minor players, for all practical purposes it only remained to be seen how long Germany would be willing to serve as France's disciple.

Germany has its share of left-wing enemies of the Bush administration, but Germans as a whole are not fond of being seen by the world as lackeys. For all its accomplishments, the EU has not yet succeeded in burying those old enmities in the hearts and minds of the French and German peoples. Germany, although currently perched on the brink of a recession, still has the world's third largest economy, and dwarfs France in population. Mr. Schroeder's popularity with German voters nose-dived soon after his re-election, in part because of his failures at economic reform but also because of his willingness to play the junior partner in the Franco-German alliance.