Leadership Quote by Joschka Fischer

Fischer’s line is diplomacy stripped to its steering mechanism: acknowledge fragmentation, then pivot to the one structure that makes fragmentation survivable. The opening clause - “There are differences” - isn’t moral relativism so much as preemption. He’s clearing space for disagreement without letting it metastasize into vetoes, the kind of sentence a coalition-minded operator uses when the room is full of states that want to be seen, not absorbed.

The real payload sits in “common interest,” a phrase that quietly demotes values talk and elevates incentives. Fischer is not asking countries to like each other, or even to agree on first principles; he’s arguing they should fear the same consequences of a world without rules. It’s a European argument in a transatlantic key: multilateralism as both ideal and insurance policy. Post-Cold War optimism had curdled into messy interventions, contested sovereignty, and the early signs of a unipolar hangover. Germany, newly confident but historically allergic to unilateral power, found its voice in exactly this register: pragmatic, procedural, suspicious of moral crusades that bypass institutions.

“Strong multilateral system” reads like bland bureaucratese until you notice the implied antagonist. Strength here means binding constraints: UN legitimacy, treaty regimes, shared enforcement - the boring architecture that stops “differences” from becoming dominion. The subtext is a warning to great powers tempted by ad hoc coalitions and to smaller states tempted by free-riding: you can keep your distinct interests, but you don’t get to opt out of the system that stabilizes them. Fischer sells multilateralism not as kumbaya, but as the least bad technology for managing a crowded planet.