Fischer stresses EU, Middle East relations

The European Union must foster longterm change in the Middle East in order to maintain its security in the 21st century, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer told a packed audience in Dodds Auditorium yesterday afternoon.

"Europe's security is no longer defined on its eastern borders, but in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East," Fischer said.

Fischer, who is serving on the Wilson School faculty for a year, described how the Iraq war, the Balkan crises and nuclear proliferation have shaped his outlook on continental affairs.

Citing the terrorist bombings in London and Madrid, he said that the Middle East "is truly our backyard, and we in the EU must cease our shortsightedness and recognize that."

Fischer described several "very plausible scenarios" for the future of the Middle East, from the breakup of Pakistan into "several smaller, nuclear Pakistans" to an Iranian-Israeli arms race.

"Iran, as a new nuclear power, will force Israel into a new arms race, and the risks there are raised substantially because nobody knows what Pakistan will do," he said.

Turkey is crucial to Europe's future engagement with the Middle East, Fischer said. He faulted the reluctance of European governments to admit Turkey into the EU as "blind and irresponsible."

"Turkey should be a security pillar for the European community, and the efforts to derail that relationship are impossibly shortsighted," Fischer said.

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Fischer, who was involved in left-leaning student groups as a young adult, first got involved in European foreign relations in the 1990s. As a pacifist and a member of the Green Party, he vocally opposed military action in Bosnia.

As foreign minister in Gerhard Schroeder's parliamentary coalition in 1999, however, Fischer stirred controversy by advocating German military action under the aegis of NATO. More recently, he oversaw the deployment of German troops into Afghanistan and has sharply criticized the Iraq war.

"I don't believe personally that the situation in Iraq can be changed for the better," he said, "and if it is not, then what is the spillover, where will be the next battlefields? The consequences of Iraq will be very serious."

In the coming decades, Fischer said, "there will not so much be a few great nuclear powers as many smaller and middle-sized nuclear powers, and a future of proliferation that the European community cannot afford to ignore."

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Fischer expressed his disagreement with current U.S. foreign policy aimed at addressing these threats.

"After 9/11, the status quo in the Middle East couldn't be accepted any longer, there is no question of that. And there was a broad highway of responsibility that led from the Twin Towers and Arlington directly to Afghanistan," he said.

Fischer argued that the Iraq war was a grave mistake and that those nations who abstained from joining the coalition made the right choice.

"We had doubts that the American public really knew that going into Baghdad means taking over the whole burden of the Middle East, and also we felt that with a Shia majority, how could you bring democracy to Iraq without playing into the cards of Iran?"

Terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the other problems of the Middle East can be addressed only in the long term, Fischer said.

"The challenge of Islamic terror must be answered with intelligence, police, and, yes, military assets," he said, "but much more than that, by answering the intellectual poverty that has prevented modernization in the Islamic nations from bringing peace."