Europeans keep eye on US presidential election

LONDON -- This is not the first US presidential election in which the world feels it has so much at stake.

In 1916, Europe was suffering German aggression and fretting over Woodrow Wilson's campaign slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War." And similar apprehension gripped the continent in 1940 when Franklin D. Roosevelt's isolationist policy carried him in the polls.

Car bomb kills three Iraqis, injures three US soldiers. A10.

When the Vietnam War raged in 1968, Richard M. Nixon's campaign promised "peace with honor," and the international community was up in arms about what many perceived as a reckless Cold Warrior.

But most European historians and political pundits agree that it has been a long time, at least a generation, since the world has felt so consumed with passion about an American election, and so many have been so hopeful of regime change in Washington. These same analysts also hasten to add that despite all the emotion so easily marshaled in foreign capitals against President Bush, there are more similarities in American foreign policy among Democrats and Republicans than there are profound differences.

But this year, there is one place where the choice between John F. Kerry and George W. Bush will indeed have a profound impact, and interestingly it is not the Middle East. It is Europe.

Timothy Garton Ash, director of the European Studies Center at Oxford, argues that the "wrenching confrontation" between Europe and America over the war in Iraq has plunged the world into crisis and made this "a formative election for the world."

"Those of us over here have always participated in the great drama of American politics. But this election will have a profound impact, especially for Europe," Garton Ash said in an interview in London.

If Bush is reelected, Garton Ash said, his unilateral approach to the international community and his willingness to flout international law will cause Europe "to define ourselves against America."

"You will become 'the other,' for Europeans," added Garton Ash, who has just published a new book that is already on British bestseller lists titled "Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time."

But, Garton Ash said, if the winner is Kerry, who is perceived as having a multilateral and internationalist approach to diplomacy, the European Union is more likely to develop "in concert" with the United States, to look to it as a partner in the economy and security and to focus on what the two sides of the Atlantic have in common, rather than what sets them apart.

For now, Europeans hold an extraordinarily negative view of this White House. The Economist magazine published a poll earlier this year that indicated only 6 percent of Europeans held a positive view of Bush.

Demonizing Bush has become a sport in Europe. Millions of protesters in Spain, Italy, France, and England took to the streets in the months preceding the war in Iraq, and in London when he made a state visit earlier this year, protesters toppled an effigy of Bush mimicking the toppling of Saddam Hussein statues in Baghdad.

But this populist loathing of Bush in Europe is about more than just popularity ratings among a world constituency that has no vote in America. It is also a matter of policy.

Foreign cooperation has advanced as a core issue in Iraq as the Bush administration turns to the United Nations to help Iraq find stability and establish a democratic state.

It is no secret that the UN is approaching Iraq with great caution, leaving some political analysts to suggest that European leaders are dragging their feet intentionally to punish Bush or at least deny him the chance to use an international effort in Iraq to boost his campaign.

Many pundits in Europe regard Kerry's public comment in March that foreign leaders preferred him over Bush as a clumsy political gaffe, and the Bush campaign has seized on it.

But Kerry's comment reflects a widely held European view that Bush embodies much about America that the world loves to detest. The long lines at cinemas from Paris to Prague for Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" attest to that. Newspapers and magazines and television talk shows and speeches in parliaments across Europe make the sentiment readily apparent on a daily basis.

One Western European diplomat in Washington who has closely observed the two candidates, said, "There will be a sense of relief in Europe if Kerry is elected. He has a very different style than Bush, and a very different instinct as an internationalist. And in diplomacy, style is substance."

"The foreign policy establishment in the Democratic Party is not substantively different from that of the Republicans, certainly not in the Middle East. But with Kerry the feeling is that there will at least be a dialogue, an attempt at understanding," the diplomat said.

Steven Everts, senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, a London-based think tank, said, "This is a foreign policy election for the US and a critical election for the world."

The newly enlarged European Union, which is in the process of adopting a constitutional treaty, is coordinating a new foreign and security policy, and seeking to redefine its role in the Middle East and the Caucasus.

While Europe has been grappling with this process over the last three years, Bush has deeply alienated many Europeans. Even before the deep rift over the war in Iraq, Bush rejected the Kyoto protocols on global warming and enacted steel tariffs against European producers that defied America's free market rhetoric.

"If Bush is defeated, Europe will say this was a difficult period, but an aberration. Four more years of Bush, however, will have a long-term impact on European policy, and the development of a permanent rift between the US and Europe," Everts said.

One crucial foreign policy difference between Kerry and Bush, he added, is that Kerry would disconnect the war in Iraq from the wider war on terror -- a linkage the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted exists but that Europe has never bought.

"If we can disconnect that, it would unlock potential for cooperation in the future between America and Europe," said Everts.

Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, who was in London last month speaking at a conference on US-European relations, said, "Ever since World War II, American elections have had a tremendous impact on the world."

He pointed out that The New York Times has run letters to the editor from people across the world who have said they feel they should be allowed to vote.

This sense that the world has a lot at stake in the US election is, Foner said, "the burden of empire that the US faces."

"We are not aware of the outer world, and the impact we have, and we should be," he said.