Jacobus Delwaide, born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1949. Ph.D. from Harvard University, Cambridge. Associate Professor of Political Science at the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel.
Fellow (1 September 1999 – 30 June 2000)
NIAS provided with me a crucial “breather” allowing me to work on my long-term project, “The German Left and the Changing International Order, 1974-2000”.
This project traces the evolution of left-of-centre international-political position since the INF issue. The INF issue contributed to the emergence of a new party (The Greens) that was explicitly distrustful toward Western international organisations, particularly NATO, and led the Social Democrats to eventually adopt a nuclear-free defence model (1986). In sharp contrast, German participation in the NATO operations against Serbia took place under a “red-green” government, while foreign affairs minister Fischer (The Greens) advocated a federally organised Europe (in his May 2000 Humboldt University lecture).
These recent developments mean that the “normalisation” of the left-of-centre view of the world after the fall of the Wall, still very much halting during the Gulf War, has actually been crowned by positions that are offensively in favour of international integration and for greater German and European responsibilities on the world stage.