"Will the West still exist in a few years?" asked Joschka Fischer, foreign minister and vice chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, speaking on campus earlier this week. To regain legitimacy, Western governments, he warned, must reconcile their differences and engage as a multilateral and cohesive force in world affairs.

Speaking in Cornell's Call Auditorium April 18 as the 2007 Bartels World Affairs Fellowship lecturer, Fischer asserted that the United States has followed an increasingly unilateral path in its foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, in the process alienating close allies in Europe. The transatlantic alliance that was forged during World War II and strengthened during the Cold War is quickly disintegrating into resentment and mistrust, he said in his talk, "Redefining the U.S.-Europe Relationship After 9/11."

Fischer, now a professor of international economic policy at Princeton University, was a popular politician in Germany, known for his Green Party politics and bluntness. With similar bluntness in his lecture, he made it clear that if "the West as we know it is to exist in a few years," then the United States and Europe must re-evaluate and rebuild their former cooperative relationship.

"America lost the moral high ground" with the war in Iraq, he said, by first bringing morality into foreign policy and then violating its own code. In a world where terrorism and violence are on the rise, "government legitimacy is the most important currency," he said. America's disintegrating relations with major countries and the infighting within the European Union, he added, are quickly eroding whatever legitimacy the Western powers have left.

"The United States is currently an indispensable power," said Fischer, "but if it retains its unilateralism then transatlanticism will become a distant memory." He warned that if the United States retreats into its pre-World War II isolationism, the subsequent vacuum in world leadership will allow China to emerge as a global power.

However, if the United States and the European Union "overcome the legacy of the past few years," and use "multilateralism as an opportunity rather than a burden," he said, they can address the most pressing problems in the world together, from Iran's nuclear programs to the humanitarian crises in Africa and Asia. Such cooperation would enable Western countries to legitimately assist in and participate in world affairs.

The annual Bartels World Affairs Fellowship Lecture is sponsored by Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Chandni Navalkha '10 is a writer intern with the Cornell Chronicle.