Branko Milanović je izrazil začudenje, kako so se nemški Zeleni lahko tako drastično transformirali v pro-vojno in evropsko-supremačistično stranko:

The German Greens transformation is one of the most extraordinary. From being pro-Third World, they are now against it (European supremacism is their mot d’ordre). From saluting successes of poorer countries, they are now attacking them ferociously (China & India).

Arnaud Betrand pojasnjuje ta fenomen z razlago Jürgena Kurza, enega izmed ustanoviteljev stranke:

Anyone interested in the German Greens and their transformation into one of the most extreme pro-war and Western-supremacist parties in Europe should read this article by Jürgen Kurz, one of the historical founders of the party.

Kurz has been living in China for now 20 years and he is married to a woman from Xinjiang (!). The article is a criticism of the Green party’s approach to China but from it you can extrapolate and explain the party’s general ideology.

First of all, as Kurz explains, the top people making up the party are stunningly inexperienced and incompetent. As he explains in the piece, Annalena Baerbock, the Green Foreign Minister, went to China for the first time in her life (!!!) in 2023, 2 years into her mandate. How do you even become Foreign Minister if you’ve never travelled to China, probably Germany’s most consequential relationship? As such she has zero knowledge of the country, or more precisely, as Kurz writes, her knowledge is “based on reports from a handful of journalists who have searched for stories there that correspond to Western biases on distant China. The problem is that the image we in the West have about China borders on denial of reality!”

Secondly, they are supremacists to their core. Kurz beautifully describes the hypocrisy behind Baerbock’s “feminist foreign policy”:

“Feminist foreign policy does not rely on posturing (‘Germany must take international leadership responsibility’), but on helping where it is appropriate and necessary. It’s about making a positive contribution to bring the global community together to collectively address and solve the problems on this planet.

These problems are primarily: The dramatic changes in the global climate and the protection of all habitats, global distribution justice, the fight against causes of migration, and the securing of peaceful coexistence of all people and their cultures.

Feminist foreign policy does not rely on loud power fantasies to enforce supposedly correct behavior and to lecture other countries like a governess. It seeks commonalities and tries to help where it is necessary. It’s not about imposing one’s ideology, but primarily about improving living conditions for people, especially women and children.

Our party has significantly shaped the political agenda of the past 43 years towards sustainable development in Europe. The Chinese have watched and learned a lot from it and applied it. That was good.

Instead of criticizing China for this, we should look positively at it. Who, if not the Chinese themselves, should implement the transition to a solar economy in China? Condemning China for applying technologies developed by us there is hypocritical […]

Today, China is the world’s leading protagonist of new energies, fighting on all fronts for the transformation of the energy economy and the preservation of the environment, and is even one of the few countries to have included environmental preservation in its constitution. (Article 26: The state shall protect and improve living environments and the ecological environment, and prevent and control pollution and other public hazards. The state shall organize and encourage afforestation and protect forests.)

From a green perspective, a born, reliable partner in the fight against climate change, with whom we can be sure that he will not follow a completely different course after the next election and with whom our economy could cooperatively work on the transformation of global cycles towards sustainable economic practices. It would be more helpful to the global climate to cooperate with China in this transformation, rather than ideologically defining China as an adversary.”

That’s a key point. You either want to prioritize climate, or supremacy and the Greens systematically prioritize the latter over the former. As Kurz points out, from a climate standpoint it should be applauded that China takes the problem seriously and developed a world-leading  green industry. Yet the Greens, and Baerbock first and foremost, criticize it because it challenges German “leadership” and have adopted one of Europe’s most confrontational approaches to China, define the country first and foremost as an “adversary”…

Why? Well, Kurz hints at this throughout the piece, this supremacy stems from “a moral sense of superiority”: “The moral tone (‘we are good’) is not only counterproductive, it is also wrong and throws us back into the old Crusadism. I firmly believe that our original ideas as GREENS could do a lot of good if we approached this task with the due respect. Playing the role of a guardian of an imaginary international order and upholding Western principles is anything but a coherent green foreign policy.”

There’s something very interesting here. The Greens, or at least the current generation of it, are probably Green because they belong to that type of people very common in the West – and particularly in protestant countries like Germany – who are driven by an very strong sense of moral superiority. The way to express this in the current cultural and political system in Germany is to be Green, the most “moral” stand one can take: “we know better and lecture the rest of Germany on how they should behave”.

But when translated internationally, this moralism takes the form of supremacy: “the more different from us a culture or a civilization is, the more morally wrong they are, and as such the more we should lecture and seek to transform them.”

As such their ideology isn’t so much “Green”, Green is just a way to express this sense of moral superiority in Germany. When translated internationally it takes an entirely different shape more appropriate to the international stage.

So to summarize we’re dealing with extremely parochial folks who really don’t know the world beyond Germany or the West, and who represent a section of German Protestant society that is most marked by a deep sense of moral superiority, which makes them moralists’ moralists, the modern incarnation of holy crusaders. This explains why when one looks at them as Greens they seem completely incoherent: it’s because, fundamentally, they aren’t.

Vir: Arnaud Betrand