Professor Joschka

Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs announced this week that the former German foreign minister and street-fighter Joshka Fischer will be joining the faculty in the fall:

This fall Fischer, 58, will teach the undergraduate course "International Crisis Diplomacy" with Woodrow Wilson School lecturer Wolfgang Danspeckgruber. In spring 2007 Fischer will co-teach with WWS Diplomat-in-Residence Ambassador Robert Hutchings and Princeton University politics professor Andrew Moravcsik an international relations graduate seminar on Europe, America and future policy challenges facing the transatlantic alliance.

In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Fischer will serve as a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, led by Danspeckgruber, and as a fellow at Princeton’s European Union Program, directed by Moravcsik.

The decision no doubt will puzzle Fischer’s right-wing detractors in the German blogosphere, who depict Joschka Fischer as viciously anti-American.  In fact, Fischer has always maintained a not-so-secret love affair with the United States, and has worked tirelessly to improve transatlantic dialogue.

How do Joschka Fischer’s positive views on America fit in with the worldview and politics of his Green Party in Germany?  According to Rezzo Schlauch, the leader of the Greed Party caucus in the Bundestag from 2002 to 2005, the Greens are "the most American of the German parties."  Schlauch writes in this month’s issue of the Atlantic-Times:

"Literally all other parties in Germany, left and right, are sending hostile signals to immigrants, even to second and third generation immigrants, basically portraying them as a burden for a preferably homogeneous German society.  Only the Green Party has a more balanced understanding of contemporary pluralist societies, an understanding more oriented toward the US model, which has always affirmed its country as a nation of immigrants with a rich history of both the problems and the opportunities of immigration and integration."

"…while on a superficial level, the German conservatives seem to be a somewhat easier partner for US administrations, the transatlantic cultural bond that exists between the US and the German liberal left represented by the Green Party is much deeper. We should keep cultivating this connection."

So, in this context, Fischer’s appointment at Princeton can be seen as a culmination of the Green’s international policy vision.  (Note: The Atlantic Times is a (high quality) monthly put outby the German embassy and the German Information Office in Washington DC.  A free subscription is available to anyone living in the US. Most of its articles are not available online.)

Joschka Fischer Germany gruene