Sigmar Gabriel’s UN address: German great power ambitions in pacifist garb
By
Johannes Stern
23 September 2017
Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel underscored Germany’s claim to great power status in an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, just days prior to Sunday’s federal election. After a flood of pacifist phrases, he concluded his remarks with an explicit call for greater German “responsibility” in world affairs, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Germany is ready to assume additional responsibility,” he declared to his international audience. “This is why my country is applying for a seat on the United Nations Security Council for the years 2019 to 2020.”
Germany, he added, has “a clear course. Peace and security, global justice and human rights are inseparably bound together.” Germany wants “to cooperate in partnership with all members of the United Nations—in Africa, Asia, America and Europe.”
Phrases about “peace,” “human rights” and “global justice” are rhetorical window dressing for Germany’s renewed turn to imperialist “Realpolitik.” Unlike the 1930s, when the German Reich left the League of Nations to rearm and prepare for war, today Berlin seeks to pursue its global imperialist ambitions within existing international organisations.
Now, as then, Germany identifies the United States as its chief rival. Gabriel did not once refer to US President Donald Trump. But his speech was a clear rejection of Trump’s “America First” strategy, to which Gabriel counterposes an ostensibly more “peaceful” German policy.
“If one looks around the world,” Gabriel declared, “it appears as though a world outlook has imposed itself that considers one’s own…