Conflict Makes for Strange Bedfellows in Europe Politics

The conflict in Yugoslavia that British Prime Minister Tony Blair calls a progressives’ war--the first run by post-World War II baby boomers--has blurred traditional lines between leftists and rightists in Europe and created some odd political bedfellows.

Many European leaders came of age in 1960s protest movements against the conservative establishment and global military-industrial complex. Now they are taking their dovish political parties and center-left governments into battle under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

They have defined NATO’s military strikes against Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic as a moral war against dictatorship and for human rights, muting criticism from many of their own constituents who might normally be demonstrating against American imperialism and the use of force.

“We are fighting for a world where dictators are no longer able to visit horrific punishments on their own peoples in order to stay in power,” Blair wrote in Newsweek magazine this week. “ . . . In this conflict we are fighting not for territory but for values.”

Along with Blair’s Labor administration, the French Socialists, traditionally cool to NATO, are launching aircraft on NATO missions. The German Social Democrats, in government with the environmentalist Greens, have sent the Luftwaffe on airstrikes for the first time since World War II. And Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, a former Communist, has fought dissenters in his own center-left coalition government to keep Italy on board and provide NATO with airstrips.

Pacifists who would see Milosevic as a brutal dictator in the mold of Chile’s former strongman, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, find themselves on the same side as hawks who view the Yugoslav leader as an old Communist posing as a nationalist. The conservative pro-war camp wants to fight, not for the moral high ground but because they believe NATO must win in order to save face and salvage the world order.

“There is in my mind no alternative but to demonstrate very firmly the credibility of NATO,” said Tom King, a former Tory defense secretary.

Thus Blair is backed by former Tory Prime Minister John Major, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has found support from his conservative opposition in the Christian Democratic Union, as well as from leftist novelist Gunter Grass, who has advocated the use of ground troops from the beginning.

In France, the alliances sometimes seem even more unlikely, with Greens Party campaigner Daniel Cohn-Bendit--formerly known as student leader “Dani the Red”--on the same side as President Jacques Chirac’s Rally for the Republic party and Gaullist chairman Philippe Seguin.

Opponents of the war on the left and the right also have made unusual de facto partnerships. In France, Communist leader Robert Hue finds himself on the same side as National Front Chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen, although for different reasons.

Opponents from the left tend toward pacifism and anti-Americanism. Right-wing opponents, meanwhile, tend toward isolationism, believing that their countries should not go to battle for anything other than their own vital interests.

Italy’s Communists and Greens oppose the war and have threatened to withdraw from the center-left government because of it. They are in the antiwar camp with Umberto Bossi’s rightist Northern League, which seeks self-rule for northern Italy and believes that the country should stay out of other people’s armed conflicts.

Bossi and Armando Cossuta, leader of the Party of Italian Communists, have both sent peace missions to Serbia. Cossuta, who calls the bombing an “illegal intervention,” headed the Communist delegation that held “peace talks” with Milosevic and embarrassed the rest of the Italian government.

Prime Minister D’Alema subsequently reaffirmed Italy’s backing for the NATO mission in a speech to parliament, insisting that it be accompanied by diplomacy and aid for refugees. This combination, he said, “is the Italian policy.”

Commentators on the right praised his speech.

“D’Alema came across as the effective leader of a country involved in a war effort,” wrote Giuliano Ferrara, the rightist editor of the newspaper Il Foglio. “Italy lived for 50 years in a state of peace, in a game of irresponsibility, fully guaranteed and paid by the American ally. Who would have thought that the post-Communist left would try to put Italy in line with its effective geopolitical role?”

One factor making it difficult for the Communists and the Greens to walk away from the government is that public opinion is shifting against them. Polls taken a week apart for L’Unita, a leftist (formerly Communist) newspaper, show support for the NATO bombing among Italians rose from 37% of those questioned in early April to 49% of those questioned by the middle of the month.

Support for airstrikes has been high generally--at least until NATO mistakes began raising the toll of civilian casualties--ranging from 50% in France to 76% in Britain. Support for ground troops ranges from 26% in Germany to 68% in France, according to polls compiled in London’s The Observer newspaper on Sunday.

Only in Greece does public opinion run strongly against the bombing, although relatively few want Greece to isolate itself by pulling out of the alliance. Sentiment there is swayed by the Christian Orthodox roots Greeks share with Serbs, their common history of fighting Muslims and outside oppressors, and strong economic ties between the Balkan neighbors.

When many of Greece’s leaders came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their country was ruled by a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. Lingering anti-American sentiment plays a strong role in their opposition to the NATO bombings.

In Germany, Chancellor Schroeder, Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer were all political activists during the 1968 protest movement. In proposing German participation in the current NATO operations, Scharping told the federal parliament that the decision was personally wrenching but that “there is no alternative. We cannot keep out of this.”

Signing off on the airstrikes and isolation of Yugoslavia would seem most troubling for Fischer and his fellow Greens after nearly two decades in opposition to NATO and conventional politics. But most prominent members of the Greens have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Schroeder.

Since the airstrikes began on March 24, fewer than 250 members of the 51,000-plus Greens have resigned in protest of their party’s role in the government decisions, said party spokesman Harald Haendel. And in conservative states like Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg, Greens membership is actually on the rise.

The event that reshaped the views of most German leftists, convincing them to support the NATO action against Yugoslavia, was the 1995 massacre of thousands of Bosnian civilians at the hands of Serb nationalists in Srebrenica.

Greens and the left-wingers within Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party learned with horror that their insistence on limiting intervention to diplomatic measures then had allowed Milosevic to continue directing his campaign of “ethnic cleansing” from the safe cover of ongoing negotiations.

This time they have agreed to engage 14 Tornado jets in the strikes against Yugoslavia. Broad support has also been forthcoming for deployment of 3,000 Bundeswehr troops and 28 Leopard heavy-battle tanks to the peacekeeping mission in Macedonia and the 6,000 German soldiers promised for policing of any peace deal that can be reached for Kosovo.

“At least since Srebrenica, the leftists have sought to clarify the proper lessons to be drawn by Germans from the history of aggression and genocide by the Nazis: “Never again war!” or “Never again ethnic murder in Europe!” the weekly Die Zeit observed in a commentary on the calm with which most Germans have reacted to the NATO bombardments.

The former Communists of the eastern German states oppose the war, however. Grego Gysi of the Party of Democratic Socialism made his own foray to Belgrade recently and came under harsh criticism from German Foreign Minister Fischer.

“You are whitewashing a new policy of fascism,” Fischer accused Gysi after he appealed for an end to the NATO airstrikes.

Dissenters in Britain also have not been well received by the public or fellow politicians. Scottish Nationalist Party chief Alex Salmond has lost support in the polls since he criticized the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Many supporters of the war against Milosevic are critical of the way it has been handled, charging that there was too little planning and preparation. But rather than turn away from war, the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees and pictures reminiscent of the Nazi’s treatment of Jews have prompted some in the center-left parties to call for ground troops ahead of the traditional hawks.

Hugo Young, a columnist for the left-of-center daily newspaper the Guardian, said the progressive parties in power have argued for a united Europe that can take matters into their own hands economically and militarily. Now they have to act, he said.

If ground troops are necessary “so be it,” he wrote this week. “A progressives’ war, no less than a general’s war, has to end the right way or be damned as a humanitarian promise that became the accomplice to a crime against humanity.”

Miller reported from London, Boudreaux from Rome and Williams from Berlin. Sarah White of The Times’ Paris Bureau contributed to this report.

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Unlikely Allies

The NATO campaign in Yugoslavia has blurred tradtional lines between left and right in Europe and created odd political bedfellows. Once-dovish leaders find themselves siding with hawkish conservative rivals in what they consider a moral war against dictatorship.

France

Backing NATO Campaign

President Jacques Chirac, conservative Rally for the Republic party.

Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, leftist Socialist Party

Against NATO Campaign

Jean-Marie Le Pen, ultra right-wing National Front Party

Robert Hue, leftist French Communist Party

Britain

Backing NATO Campaign

Prime Minister Tony Blair, moderate Labor Party

Former Prime Minister John Major, Conservative Party

Germany

Backing NATO Campaign

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, center-left Social Democratic Party

Gunter Grass, leftist novelist