The fellow on the horse, according to this scenario, is Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, who’s just been hired by two of the members of the consortium backing the projected Nabucco natural gas pipeline. His job: to make the case that Nabucco is vitally needed to rescue Europe from a crippling dependency on Russia for its energy supply.
Lurking in a nearby saloon: Gerhard Schröder, the former Social Democratic chancellor and once Mr. Fischer’s boss, who now functions as point man in Germany for Gazprom, the Russian energy monopoly. Gazprom has spiced the script with a plan to build a pipeline called South Stream that’s clearly meant to thwart Nabucco, supported cautiously by the European Union and the United States.
In truth, the plot’s socko, big-star confrontation bears the weight of a back story about bringing gas from the Caspian region and the Middle East to Europe that is full of gray zones and caveats, nuance and private deals. Nothing dictates, of course, that a direct Fischer-Schröder matchup will take place.
But no matter, the editorial page of the left-of-center Süddeutsche Zeitung is presenting “Nabucco versus South Stream as something akin in the view of Europeans to the struggle between good and evil.”
(This much is sure: its potential actors make for a much more interesting face-off than the September election between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, both stuck with defending the same Grand Coalition economic policies that the International Monetary Fund projects will keep Germany in recession into 2011.)
While Mr. Schröder turned east in 2005 — he rushed through a Russia-to-Germany pipeline project called Nord Stream that detours around Poland a few weeks before his election defeat, and just afterward grabbed Vladimir V. Putin’s offer to run Gazprom’s German operation — Mr. Fischer, the former Greens party chief, headed for the United States to teach at Princeton.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Fischer signed a year’s contract as a political and diplomatic adviser with RWE of Germany and OMV of Austria, members of the Nabucco investor group that also includes firms from Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.
The easy assumption about Mr. Fischer’s job is that it involves smoothing relations with Turkey, whose full membership in the European Union has his backing, but which continues to maintain demanding terms for Nabucco to actually come on line in 2014.
In talking to him last week, I got the sense he feels his mission involves a lot more.
Very particularly, convincing his own country, with its very lukewarm feelings about Nabucco because of how it could affect relations with Russia, that Germany must not be perceived as protecting its sweetheart deals in a way that reinforces Europe’s dependent energy status.
Mr. Fischer said, “Nabucco is not against Russia. But the Russians give the impression that they think they have been given a monopoly. Nobody who’s concerned about our national interests can want this monopoly.”
In the context of German debate, numbed by the collusive fog of four years of the Grand Coalition and its in-house arrangements — Mrs. Merkel expressed reservations about Nord Stream during the 2005 election campaign then quickly approved it once chancellor — Mr. Fischer’s words represent strong, independent language.
This year, at the annual meeting on international security in Munich in February, Mrs. Merkel talked about energy without ever mentioning Nabucco.
In April, according to two U.S. officials, Germany (with France), apparently acting out of concern for sounding confrontational to Russian ears, went so far as to resist juxtaposing the words energy and security in a declaration coming out of the NATO summit meeting in Brussels.
One of the officials said that by way of an explanation he was offered “the convoluted logic that being dependent on Russia for energy actually made the Russians dependent on the West for cash.”
More: A former American diplomat, in a conversation, asserted recently that Russian officials have told Germans that Nabucco’s effect would be to cannibalize the Russian plans for supplying Germany with gas via Nord Stream.
He also said Germany brushed aside a discussion, backed by the European Commission, on whether the European Union should take Gazprom to court as a monopoly in the manner of its successful suit against Microsoft.
Although the Obama administration has assumed a softly-softly approach in its support of Nabucco, its concerns about Europe’s energy dependency hardly appear to have diminished.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said Russia was “attempting to create a gas equivalent” of OPEC, and that this, alongside the pattern of Russian cutoffs of European gas supply “is certainly a significant security challenge that we ignore at our peril.” Senator Richard Lugar, a senior Republican member lof the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, refers to “Europeans who have not dealt very positively” with energy security.
The Americans, perish the thought, don’t name names, perhaps thinking Berlin’s position has become more flexible, now that Russia is again threatening Ukraine with cuts in its gas supply. Just perhaps, though, because in this capital you can’t miss the considerable sentiment to portray Ukraine as the ultimate culprit.
I asked Mr. Fischer, who’s amused about being cast as the man in the white hat, about his relations with Gazprom’s top gunslinger in Europe.
Referring to how the old chancellor landed in Mr. Putin’s lap in exchange for big bucks (and only limited opprobrium at home), he said of Mr. Schröder, “He’s not an evil guy, but I am unable to explain it to you. I didn’t understand it, and I don’t understand it now.
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