Angela Merkel’s War for Europe

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/angela-merkels-war-for-europe.html

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HAMBURG — FOR the 10 years that she has occupied the German chancellor’s office, Angela Merkel has kept her country out of any meaningful military engagement, most recently in Libya, even if this meant leaving her European partners in the lurch. Now, with her decision to commit fighting forces in Syria, the chancellor is not only entering her first war, she is entering a new kind of world war.

Ms. Merkel has been deeply skeptical about military interventions, not for ideological reasons (she endorsed the Iraq war in 2003), but out of pragmatism. It didn’t take any special prescience to see how badly they would turn out, and to Ms. Merkel, the likelihood of losing the support of Germany’s traditionally pacifist mainstream — and therefore, likely, her job — always appeared significantly higher than of winning a war.

So strong was her aversion to military risk that she even stayed out of NATO’s minimally interventionist operation in Libya in 2011, despite a United Nations authorizing resolution and Arab League consent.

What made the chancellor change her mind in Syria? It’s not just that a majority of Germans, 57 percent according to recent polls, favor military action against the Islamic State. It’s also that Ms. Merkel had to change her course in the Middle East in order to keep her course for Europe.

Ms. Merkel understands that the war in Syria represents a different kind of conflict. It pits not just countries and alliances against one another, but ideas — in particular, three ideas of world order: the authoritarian world order, embodied by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his ally Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who put stability above human rights and democracy; the liberal world order, represented by Western Europe and America, which value the reverse; and the Islamic State, which seeks to upend both orders and replace it with a world-spanning caliphate.

This three-way clash presents a potentially fatal challenge to European unity, and Ms. Merkel seems to believe that she had to change her course in the Middle East in order to keep her course for Europe. By sending reconnaissance jets and refueling planes to Syria and a frigate into the Mediterranean, she is fighting less to destroy the Islamic State than to save what’s left of European Union solidarity.

The combination of the euro crisis, the enormous refugee influx and the Paris attacks have brought the union’s political cohesion to an unprecedented low. More clearly than ever before, we see that sharing common values held only until it was tested. Whereas the currency crisis revealed long-unaddressed economic culture clashes across the Continent, the refugee crisis exposed an even deeper divide within the bloc — above all, very different, and clashing, ideas about tolerance.

Eastern European states have made it clear that they will accept neither Muslim refugees nor their free movement in Europe. Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orban, says he wants “to keep Europe Christian.” One of the first public acts of the newly elected right-wing government of Poland was to remove the European flag from its press briefing room — a clear sign that the country will cordon itself off from the European Union if Germany continues its open-door policy for refugees.

These xenophobic, anti-union views, long relegated to the far right in the West, have broken into the mainstream in the wake of the Paris attacks. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front, shares the Eastern European view that the union should be all but dismantled, starting with the Schengen idea of borderless travel. She also shares the broadly Southern European view that the euro is an unhealthy corset that suffocates the breathing of national economies.

Ms. Le Pen was already scoring high in France’s polls before the terrorists hit Paris. And her party was the big winner in regional elections on Sunday, with a 30 percent share of the votes nationwide. The chances that she will be the next president of France are real.

If this happens — if one of the main powers behind the European Union elected a radically anti-union leader — the whole thing could begin to disintegrate.

Not only would the core of the European Union, the French-German partnership, split; Germany would find itself more or less isolated as the last big “traditionalist” European Union country. Britain might well follow France’s lead and withdraw — already a strong possibility — and it wouldn’t take long for other countries to do the same.

And in an atmosphere of instability and fear, Europeans could well decide that it’s payback time against Germany, the annoying headmaster, whose economic and cultural domination has rankled too many for too long.

At least, this is the fear in Berlin, and this is why Germany has now jumped into Syria.

But to what end? As opposed to France, Russia or America, destroying the Islamic State isn’t Ms. Merkel’s main goal. Rather, she wants to demonstrate, alongside France and Britain, that Europe’s political center can still act coherently, decisively and in solidarity against what Europeans regard as a common threat to their liberty and safety.

The French president, François Hollande, did not invoke NATO’s Article 5 after the Paris attacks. Instead, he invoked the solidarity clause of the European Union treaty, the first leader ever to do so. Ms. Merkel’s challenge, then, is to show that the principle behind the treaty, behind the European Union itself, isn’t an empty promise — for her sake, and for the Continent’s.