“A German War”: Anti-Americanism, the Post-Reunification Left, and the 1991 Gulf War

Writing for the magazine links in February 1991, the Marxist sociologist Detlev Claussen reflected on the intense German reaction to the Gulf War. “The public debate over war and peace” was so charged, he observed, that one might think the “war was taking place not on the Gulf, but on the Elbe.” Claussen was not alone in this assessment. Commentators across the left and liberal media sphere declared that the Gulf War “was actually taking place in Germany,” or at least had a “front” in Germany.

Why did Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the American-led counter-invasion of Iraq in January 1991 – what was fundamentally a conflict over access to oil in the Persian Gulf– so inflame leftists and liberals? This paper examines the German Left’s response to the Gulf Crisis (1990-1) as a means to map its ideological realignment that occurred in the wake of the GDR’s collapse and against the backdrop of German reunification. It shows that the Gulf Crisis was the context in which parts of the German Left embraced the American-led international order and abandoned critiques of capitalism and imperialism.

Specifically, the paper concerns how some influential German leftists responded to anti-American rhetoric at anti-war protests. They read the anti-war movement’s refusal to support Germany in joining the American-led invasion of Iraq, in view of President Saddam Hussein’s threats to destroy Israel, as latently antisemitic, and argued that the American-led liberal international order was the only way to prevent nationalist, antisemitic currents from re-emerging in reunified Germany. The paper argues that at stake in this “German war” on the Gulf, as the historian Dan Diner put it, was the substance of left-wing commitments in a post-socialist world. It concludes by pointing to the longer-term consequences of the political realignment underway.