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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
“Great Vote, Grisly Result”
Doubtless there will be talk about a fresh start and the importance of olive branches on both sides of the Atlantic as George W. Bush begins his second four-year term. However, heading into 2005, the chill initially cast by his reelection has yet to thaw in much of Europe, nor are fears allayed of a deepening split between the United States and its estranged allies. For the most part, European newspapers and political commentators expressed in their very different styles both chagrin at the result and foreboding for the future. To take two striking examples: one of the British commentators most consistently sympathetic to the United States wrote a piece quite fairly headlined “Great Vote, Grisly Result.” A French historian who is a professor at Harvard predicts “inevitable divorce” between Europe and America. The European Union is an extremely diverse place, with 25 nations, more than 20 languages and 450 million people, not to mention sharp ideological divides from left to right. Other factors influence comment, for example religion: Catholic newspapers and political parties have very different responses to American politics than socialist, social democratic, and labor papers. There are, of course, widely divergent traditional attitudes toward the United States. Poles see the United States as the benevolent titan that first freed them from Czarist Russia, then saved them from communism. The French have a more negative tradition. Many factors have influenced this, from a memory that the United States abandoned France after the First World War to resentment of American criticism of French policy in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s, and a more general feeling that the United States wants to eliminate French individuality in politics, language, and culture. Attitudes in Britain and Germany cover a wide span in each case, but lie for the most part in both countries somewhere between Polish gratitude and French suspicion. There is also a wide range of difference in the degrees of expertise and sophistication in coverage of American politics. Readers will have their own opinion of the extent to which the various extracts I shall cite display understanding or otherwise of what was at issue in the election. In some cases, misapprehensions could hardly have been more elementary. One television network, in Croatia, referred throughout election night to Senator “Kennedy” as the Democratic candidate. As it happens, I found myself in the Netherlands, at the University of Leiden, on election night and for several days thereafter. My sample of European opinion, therefore, is fairly wide. I switched between election coverage on CNN and the BBC, with occasional swoops into French and German news programs. I also downloaded coverage and comment from the websites of two Italian, two French, one Spanish, and four German-language newspapers, one of them Swiss. I attempted to read two Dutch papers, but my knowledge of Dutch is rudimentary. I also read several British newspapers.1 Obviously, this is a grossly unscientific sample of opinion. I cannot read Polish or Czech or Danish, for example, nor did I have time to read magazines and periodicals that are not easily found online. I offer it only because it does suggest some of the variety of European opinion, and the consequent danger of generalizing about what “the Europeans” think about anything. Even so, what was striking on this occasion was precisely how far the Continent (and its offshore island, Britain) were broadly in agreement that it was too bad that Bush won, that it will make life more difficult, but that we will have to live with the fact that Americans are much less like us than we thought. Certain further broad-brush generalizations can be offered. Business papers, like the Financial Times and The Business in London, and papers with many businessmen in their readership (such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tageszeitung, and Le Figaro) were not necessarily sympathetic to the Bush administration, but their criticisms were softened by their general assumption that Bush’s victory would be good for stock market prices and for business conditions generally. Second, diplomatic correspondents and experts tended to put more emphasis on the need for Europe and the United States to work together, however difficult that might be, than commentators with a more general or more political emphasis. As might perhaps be expected, the most negative responses, overall, were in France. While President Jacques Chirac showed signs of wanting to heal the damaging breach in relations with Washington which goes back to (arguably exaggerated) resentment in Washington of Chirac’s behavior at the time of the countdown to war in Iraq, many French politicians and most French media interpreted the election result as evidence of a deep rift between French and American attitudes toward the world. Chirac hailed Bush’s victory as “an opportunity for reinforcing Franco-American friendship.” On the other hand, ahead of a meeting with Tony Blair on November 13, Chirac went out of his way to suggest that Blair was naive if he expected to be rewarded by Washington for his loyalty. Even before John Kerry had acknowledged Bush’s victory, the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, hastened to send his best wishes to President Bush and to the American people, France’s “friend and ally.” Opposition politicians in France were not so polite. A former foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, said there would be “a sort of hangover in world opinion because almost all peoples wanted a change” in the White House. A leading socialist, François Hollande, said that Europe must be strong in comparison with the United States “because America will, whatever happens, try to impose her vision of the world.” A long and pessimistic analysis, written before Election Day, came from Patrice Higonnet, a Frenchman who teaches history at Harvard, and who has published a number of highly respected essays about relations between the United States and France in the past. In 1940, Higonnet wrote in Le Monde, the French premier Paul Reynaud appealed to Franklin Roosevelt as a savior. Today, Americans are not saviors, they are “des trouble-fête, et peut-être même des trublions”: spoilsports and perhaps even troublemakers. Higonnet traced the roots of suspicion between America and Europe right back to the 1840s. Ever since then, he said, Americans had seen Europeans as the opposite of how they wanted to see themselves: “Homo americanus,” in the American mind, “is a free man, open and optimistic, his republican institutions and his fetish of a constitution are perfect.... The European, and perhaps the Frenchman more than any other, is a being dependent, ironic, complicated, over-cultivated, pessimistic, arrogant, hostile to progress, more or less dishonest, cowardly and disloyal, secretive.” “We are living through a great turning-point in the history of this old couple, America and Europe,” Higonnet ended. “A divorce, to me, seems to be inevitable. It will be friendly if John Kerry wins; bitter if the elections go badly. A victory for George Bush would be a great misfortune for Europe and for the planet, and that saddens me. It would also be a disaster for the United States, and that exasperates me.” With the exception of Tony Blair, who hastened to Washington to try to transmute his loyalty into the fine gold of some real shift in the Bush administration’s policy on Palestine, the only European leader who appeared genuinely delighted by Bush’s victory was Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Election Day caught him in Moscow, where he was meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Bush had won, in Berlusconi’s opinion, because of the good state of the American economy, and especially because he had cut taxes. Berlusconi listed a number of international issues to which the approach, he thought, could only be multilateral: the fight against terrorism, exit from the Iraq war, the Middle East, and the nuclear question in Iran. “It is in the interests of both parties to make relations closer” between the European Union and the United States, Berlusconi said. “The West is not two, but one.” Tony Blair may well have been too quick out of the blocks in visiting Washington. It was widely forecast in London that he would somehow be able to cash in his loyal support to President Bush for a significant shift in American policy toward the Palestinians. Specifically, reporters were briefed that Blair hoped to get the president’s agreement on two moves: the dispatch of a special envoy to move the peace process forward, and a London conference that would enable Blair to put his own stamp on the proceedings. In the event, Bush and Blair had a two-hour tête-à-tête over dinner, and at the press conference the following day the president was grace itself. He praised the prime minister as a man who doesn’t wilt. (A British newspaper, the Independent, headlined this the next morning, mocking the president’s “phony Texas accent”—as the Independent finds it—as “dunt wilt.”) Under pressure from a British reporter in the Washington press conference, Bush did go so far as to admit that he would like to see a two-state solution to the Middle East problem by the end of his second term. But it was plain that, at best, Blair had arrived at a time when the new administration had not yet reached a detailed position. Specifically, it was clear that the president and his advisers were at pains not to make life difficult for Yasir Arafat’s more moderate successors by seeming to nominate them as the “American candidates.” In his haste to show that he was the president’s best friend, Blair had arrived too early to get what he wanted. Counterintuitively, perhaps, British newspapers are in any case and on many subjects always more outspoken and less respectful than American metropolitan dailies. The Guardian, for example, which while liberal and consistently critical of Republican policy is a highly literate and journalistically energetic broadsheet, habitually publishes caricatures of the president by Steve Bell and Martin Rowson that can only be described as dehumanizing and grossly offensive. The London Daily Mirror, usually by no means as rambunctiously rude as Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, splashed a headline the morning after the election asking how 59 million Americans could be “so dumb” as to vote for Bush. “Learning to Live with Bush” German newspapers, in general, are less rowdy. They were on this occasion also less openly disappointed by the result of the election than their French counterparts. Die Welt, founded by Axel Springer, the very model of a conservative capitalist in German terms, reported that the German “government hopes that the reelected president will use the chance for a new start in transatlantic relations and for an initiative toward Europe, which would make possible more cooperation, more agreement.” It also quoted the usually pro-American former defense minister Volker Rühe as expressing the hope that in a new administration President Bush would remove one or more “agitators” (Scharfmacher), such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Munich paper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, a generally conservative paper and one of the best publications of that kind in Europe, published a long and carefully argued commentary by Christian Wernicke, its Brussels correspondent, on the day after the election headlined “Learning to Live with Bush.” Strong supporters of European integration, Wernicke argued, believe Bush’s victory “will push Europe to develop its own independent foreign policy.” The argument, he said, “imitates the logic of those mullahs in Tehran who before the election openly wished for a Bush victory. Our opponents will help us to close our own ranks.” The idea of a “‘European EU,’ as an alternative to an ‘Atlantic EU’” leads nowhere, the paper said. And this was not just because Britons and Poles, Dutchmen or Danes reject such a project. In the real world, the idea of the European Union as a counterweight to the United States does not add up. Europe, Wernicke wrote, “must find the will and the means (including military means) for a stronger role. But against America this will not be achieved in a hurry. Anyone who wants the United States to pay more attention to the EU must first respect the result of the election of November 2, 2004—and learn to live with Bush.” It is perhaps not too much to say that Wernicke’s argument against “a European EU” veils a sense that an “Atlantic EU” is much less easy to imagine than it was once. A similar ambivalence marks thoughtful responses from three very different British commentators. Peter Riddell, political editor of the Times (Murdoch-owned and consistently pro-American) and before that of the Financial Times, is admired for his knowledge and his lack of partisanship. Yet he ended a gentle piece with the statement that “the trickiest question for Mr Blair is whether he will continue to suffer politically from his closeness to Mr Bush.” “The close Bush-Blair links,” Riddell wrote, “...threaten Mr Blair’s aim of taking a leading position in the EU, a danger which he does not appreciate.... Jacques Chirac will not be alone in Europe in using the re-election of Mr Bush as justification for creating a distinctive European pillar in competition with the US....” To be sure, this approach is rejected by some of the new EU countries in Eastern Europe as well as by Tony Blair. “But a continued Bush presidency may not only further divide Europe but also leave Britain adrift in the mid-Atlantic.” Tony Blair likes to think of himself, it may be noted, as a bridge across the Atlantic. One of his gentler critics sees him rather as adrift in the middle of it. The London Independent likewise published a long and reflective article by Sir Menzies “Ming” Campbell, then the Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesman. (The Liberal Democrats in Britain are a centrist party, not “liberal” in the American sense.) Europe must maintain a strong alliance with the United States, but “we must finally and fully acknowledge the fundamental importance of Europe to [Britain’s] modern-day prosperity, stability and security. Equally we should be under no illusion as to the force of American pragmatism and the determined pursuit of its national interest.” Blair’s “self appointed role as a one-man bridge across the Atlantic may be well-intentioned but a Europe that presents a united front will cut far more mustard in the US than an ‘old Friend’ trying to call in favours.” From advising Blair, Campbell turned to chiding the United States. “America should reinvigorate its support for the framework of international law and human rights that it was so instrumental in creating. Recent events have undermined America’s international standing for a generation. We expect America to adhere to the principles upon which it was founded.” That might annoy Americans. But, coming from a notably moderate politician well-known for pro-American sentiments in the past it does suggest how deep the gulf has become, not between Europeans and Americans, but between majority European opinion and a conservative American administration. The same point is driven home by a comment in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash, who first came to prominence as a strongly anticommunist editor at the conservative Spectator magazine. Garton Ash teaches at Oxford and also at Stanford. He began his report on the U.S. election in Anacostia, Virginia, a mile from Capitol Hill, which reminded him, he said, of Soweto. He was thrilled by what he called the “energizing story” of high voter turnout and by the sight of long lines of African-American voters. “For all the corrupting role of big money, the meddling by lawyers and the distorting effects of biased media,” Garton Ash wrote, “this was an overwhelming, heart lifting expression of the popular will. Here was one of those elemental moments, as in South Africa, as in Poland in 1989, as in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, when the great tempestuous river of democracy breaks through all the barriers erected in its way. Yet with what a horrible result!” President Bush may “hold out a small olive branch to alienated Europeans,” Gar-ton Ash wrote, a prediction that seems less likely after the resignation of Secretary of State Colin Powell and the elevation of Condoleezza Rice. If so, he went on, “we should reject the temptation to refuse it. This is not just for ourselves and for our vital interests. It’s also a matter of keeping faith with the other America: the half, or very nearly half, who think like us.” Bad News Of course these extracts are only a small and no doubt a selective sampling of the truly voluminous coverage of the U.S. presidential election and its result in the European media. They do, however, in my opinion, point to a number of conclusions that many Americans, and many long-time admirers of the United States, like myself, will find troubling. First, there is broad consensus in Europe that the election result is bad news for Europe and for the rest of the world, that the Bush administration will be difficult to deal with, and perhaps dangerous, and that it is a pity that it returns with a margin that will be taken as a mandate for strong, nationalist policies, without too much concern about the opinions of Europeans or anyone else abroad. Second, there is almost total incomprehension of the motives that have led a majority (albeit a rather narrow majority) of Americans to vote for Bush. One learned article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Patrick Bahners, “Der Krieg der Welten” (The war of the worlds), did puzzle over the differences between European and American attitudes toward religion in politics, and defended Bush’s position on abortion as in line with the values of the European Enlightenment. But so far from showing understanding of American evangelical Protestantism, most European papers simply seemed to take it as evidence of obscurantism and reaction. Lastly, the European reactions to the election do suggest that there is a wide and perhaps growing gulf between the political assumptions of the populations of the United States and the European Union. This shows up in different attitudes toward specific issues, such as abortion, the death penalty (though it is quite possible that mass European attitudes there are closer to American ones), and environmental questions. But perhaps the central division concerns nationalism. Even though nationalism is hardly dead in Britain or France, or even in Germany, most Europeans blame the excesses of nationalism for the catastrophes of the twentieth century. They are puzzled and even shocked by the unapologetic nationalism of Americans in general, and conservative Republicans in particular. On a number of current issues it is already plain that further causes of suspicion of the Bush administration in Europe lie ahead. Washington is clearly not happy with the attempt by Britian, France, and Germany to prevent nuclear proliferation in Iran. The fall in the dollar exchange rate against the euro is painful for Eurozone exporters. Washington’s comparative lack of sympathy for the Palestinians remains an irritant. Divorce may or may not be inevitable. But the couple are already sleeping in separate beds. Notes
* Godfrey Hodgson is an associate fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has covered the United States for leading British newspapers since 1962 and is the author of several books on U.S. politics, including More Equal Than Others (Princeton, 2004). He is working on a biography of President Wilson’s adviser, Colonel House, for Yale University Press. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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