European Reactions to US Election Suggest Rapprochement Possible,
Not Assured
European reaction to the re-election of President George W Bush ranged from the diplomatic to the despairing. The “common values of liberty and democracy are a solid basis from which Europe and Northern America can design more solid security and development strategies,” said Italy's President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Other commentators were evidently in a state of exasperation and denial. “How could this happen?” asked Der Spiegel, the German news weekly.

Support for a vigorous rapprochement came from some unlikely quarters. “This is not about denying the political and cultural differences which separate a majority of Americans from a majority of Europeans,” writes Bruno Tertrais in Libération, the left-of-center French daily. “This is about recognizing that common challenges and how we deal with them should transcend personal preferences and ideologies.” Europe, he suggests, needs to become “more lucid and realistic about foreign policy.”

“It's unthinkable… that difficult processes, such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, can be managed without a transatlantic understanding,” concedes El País, the Left-of-center Spanish daily and a strong supporter of Spain's socialist Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. It is clear that “in spite of its rhetoric” Europe needed US intervention in the Balkans as elsewhere. “Everybody must realize that the EU and the US need each other."

For the French government the election result provided an opportunity for cautious but unapologetic rapprochement, although the conciliatory impact of President Jacques Chirac's “Cher George” letter was limited by his snubbing of Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi at the recent EU summit. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier was “concerned to see both Americans and Europeans expressing doubts over the future of transatlantic relations” and “troubled to see that Europe is misunderstood, if not scorned, in the US." While the Iraq war was a source of division, said Barnier, “the important thing now is to turn Iraq into a real success story. France has no other aim." But Barnier recently demanded that "those who have chosen the path of armed resistance" in Iraq be included in negotiations between the present Iraqi government and the coalition.

Karsten Voigt, coordinator of transatlantic relations in Germany's foreign ministry, called for “a strategic dialogue on the broader Middle East" in a symposium on the election. But Germany's problem is that while the political elite understands the need to work with the United States, public opinion is less convinced, argues Karl-Heinz Kamp, a transatlantic relations expert with the Christian Democrat-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation. “On the public side, there is the illusion that we can construct Europe as a counterweight to the US,” he says. ”Some 80 percent of Europeans are against any engagement in Iraq but, says Kamp, the pivotal importance of the region means that “we cannot let the Americans and the British fail.”

Other commentators hint at the potential for more practical engagement as a way of reviving transatlantic partnership. “Germany is ready to deliver [in Iraq]-- to help build up civil society, to create effective administrative structures and to help clean up ecological problems,” said Gerd Weisskirchen, foreign policy spokesman for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party in the Bundestag. “I could foresee our people going there if they are willing, for example, with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, to help stabilize democratic structures.”

Some observers believe the German government was relieved at Democratic candidate John Kerry's defeat. “They knew if Kerry got elected they would have more pressure on them vis-à-vis Iraq -- a lot more pressure,” said Bernhard May, a fellow at Berlin's Council on Foreign Relations. People realized that Kerry “would not be a nice, friendly and European-centered President,” May suggested. “If he had been elected and he had made demands of Europe, and especially Germany, that would have led to a real transatlantic crisis.”

The Adenauer Foundation's Kamp fears that the re-election of President Bush will see Europe's prevailing “anti-Bushism” converted into widespread anti-Americanism. “Europeans will see that Bush is not an accident in history but was deliberately chosen by America a second time,” says Kamp. ”That will make them look at Americans and say there is something very wrong with these guys.”

As if to confirm Kamp's fears, Emmanuel Todd, one of a long list of intellectuals confidently predicting the decline of the “American empire,” argues in Libération that “the problem is not Bush, it's the whole United States and the evolution of its people, ravaged by a regressive, aggressive ideology.”

Other agitated voices on Europe's Left go further, arguing for the dissolution of key Atlanticist institutions. Jonathan Steele, foreign correspondent for Britain's left-of-center Guardian, argues that "NATO gives the US a significant instrument for moral and political pressure” on its European allies, who are “automatically expected to tag along in going to war, or in the post-conflict phase, as in Afghanistan or Iraq.”

More sober analysis comes from Denis Jeambar in L'Express, the Right-of-center French weekly, who believes the current transatlantic malaise has deep ideological and political roots. “What is the number one purpose of politics?” asks Jeambar. “By re-electing President Bush the American people have reminded us that it is domestic and foreign security.” “The fact that for the past 50 years Europe's construction has not been able to give birth to a joint army proves to what extent we have forgotten that peace is a rare commodity, costly and temporary, which we must protect incessantly.” In this perspective, the Europeans' incomprehension in the face of President Bush's re-election stems from the EU's own paralysis.

EU Summit Reveals Limits to Euro-Unity
Last week's EU summit, the first following the US election, “did very little to fulfill expectations of improved transatlantic relations,” says Franco Venturini in Italy's centrist Corriere della Sera. “With the exception of Blair and Berlusconi, the principal protagonists of the European scenario seemed to tell Bush that they're waiting for him to make the first move for a new transatlantic course.”

EU leaders issued a summit declaration reaffirming the importance of transatlantic ties and stressing their hope of working with the new administration “to promote the rule of law and create a just, democratic and secure world,” albeit within "multilateral institutions."

According to British Prime Minister Tony Blair there is “a real sense that in the second term the president has space and energy to develop an agenda that I hope can unify Europe and America.” While some observers suggest that the Atlantic became a whole lot wider with President Bush's re-election, others are more sanguine, suggesting that the good relationship European Commission President-designate José Manuel Barroso enjoys with the US President will bolster the Bush-Blair axis and strengthen “Euro-Atlanticist” forces.

The EU summit witnessed a troika of France, Germany and Spain pointedly holding their own “sub-summit” to signal their distance from Tony Blair's insistence that EU leaders accommodate to the new US administration.

Chirac's calculated snubbing of Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi at the summit, citing a hectic schedule (he nevertheless found time to squeeze in a visit to the ailing Yasser Arafat), his recent warnings against US imperialism in Hanoi and intensive lobbying to get the EU arms embargo against China lifted suggest a realpolitik explicitly at odds with democratizing tendencies elsewhere in Europe. His positions have prompted criticism even within France. “Chirac's dangerous liaisons with dictators have created a hidden diplomatic principle: preserving the stability of dictatorship rather than promoting democracy,” argues Sylvain Charat of Eurolibnetwork, a Paris-based think tank.

Blair went further this week in his annual foreign policy speech in London's Mansion House, arguing that democratization gives meaning and momentum to transatlantic politics. "Democracy is the meeting point for Europe and America," he told the City of London meeting. "I am not --- repeat not --- advocating a series of military solutions to achieve it,” he stressed. “But I am saying that ... Europe and America should be working together to bring the democratic, human and political rights we take for granted to the world denied them."

“Increasingly both Europe and America are coming to realize that lasting security against fanatics and terrorists cannot be provided by conventional military force,” said Blair, “but requires a commitment to democracy, freedom and justice." "There is an opportunity for Europe,” he said, noting that “American policy is evolving.”

Pre-empting an imminent report to the United Nations on its own reforms, Blair argued that Kofi Annan should insist on "a greater role of leadership for the UN on the responsibility of states to protect, not injure, their own citizens." Promoting democracy and human rights should be the issues that define the United Nations' role.

But he also argued for a shift in the US approach. “Multilateralism that works should be [America's] aim," Blair said. "I have no sympathy for unilateralism for its own sake."

PM Tony Blair Issues No Call for an International "Third Way":
Progressives, Neo-conservatives Share Democratization Agenda
"When the Americans say we want to extend democracy to these countries, or extend democracy and human rights throughout the Middle East in the Greater Middle East Initiative, people say, well, that is part of the neo-conservative agenda,” Tony Blair recently told the London Times, ”Actually, if you put it in different language, it is a progressive agenda," he said.

Blair's comments powerfully affirmed that the politics of democratization transcend party affiliation and ideological inclination. In fact, the politics of democratization is prompting the formation of new alliances in global politics, some of them both unexpectedly encouraging, and some of them disturbing. The diversity of the Iraq war coalition has already occasioned comment for bringing together Right-wing US Republicans with European social democrats, former communists in Poland with Italy's New Right. But some emerging and explicitly anti-democratic formations appear to have avoided the radar screens of most commentators.

A number of the world's authoritarians and autocrats, often taking advantage of divisions among the world's leading democracies, appear increasingly assertive in attacking democrats, imprisoning human rights campaigners and intervening to manipulate elections. Recent events suggest a trend that should give supporters of democracy cause for concern: the prosecution of Sumate, the Venezuelan NGO, by the government of Hugo Chavez; the conviction of Paul Kamara, editor of Sierra Leone's For Di People, newspaper for "criminally libeling" the country's President; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's aggressive lobbying in Arab and European capitals against the Greater Middle East Initiative; the recent mass arrest of Iranian internet activists; the detention and reported torture of Abd-al-Hadi Al-Khawajah, executive director of Bahrain's Centre for Human Rights; the deportation from Zimbabwe and Colombia of trade union fact-finding missions within the same week; and the flagrant interference in Ukraine's election by an increasingly authoritarian Russia, which is also striving to undermine the pro-democracy Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Yet it is a sign of the vibrancy of the politics of democratization that politicians as diverse as George W Bush, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer express a shared conviction that a new form of totalitarianism – recently and tragically evident on the streets of Amsterdam – can only be vanquished by a strategic commitment to the transformation of the broader Middle East. Likewise, while some democrats in the Middle East (as elsewhere) were concerned with the “realist” tone of certain of John Kerry's presidential campaign statements, other leading US Democrats have articulated a progressive internationalism that stresses democracy promotion as forcefully and eloquently as the most ardent “neo-con.”

On both sides of the Atlantic, a combination of lazy journalism and political opportunism has allowed pro-democracy policies to be too readily associated with American neo-conservatives who are typically portrayed as a sinister “cabal.” Aside from the distasteful if latent anti-semitism that sometimes taints such accounts, they rightly credit neo-conservatives with elevating a politics of democratization above the previously dominant foreign policy paradigm of cynical, Kissingerian “realism.” These accounts are also useful in establishing, that counter to the analyses of such "paleo-cons" as Patrick Buchanan and George Will, US support for democratization is not rooted in merely a "globalist" impulse, but has a strong foundation in US national interests.

Euro-Gaullists vs. Euro-Atlanticists: Germany Seen As Pivotal
Much European reaction to the US election reflected what writer Timothy Garton Ash has called Euro-Gaullism, the conviction that US power must be constrained or balanced by a countervailing European influence in global politics. French President Jacques Chirac's insistence on multipolarity is the best-known reflection of this, but former UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is another advocate. Euro-Gaullism reflects Europe's inability to develop not only a common foreign policy and security strategy but a coherent identity of its own, says political theorist Francis Fukuyama. It therefore seeks to identify itself as the antithesis of the Other, namely the United States.

Despite his diplomatic overtures to the new Bush administration, President Chirac is aiming to project France -– and whatever Euro-Gaullist allies it can muster -- as the leader of a countervailing “multipolarity” to the United States. In Chirac's view, writes British commentator Timothy Garton Ash, “Everyone else in the world, and especially rising China, should know that there is an alternative version of the west, which speaks another language (French) and is peace-loving, law-abiding, socially concerned, humane and seductive --- or, according to taste, weak, cynical, corrupt and hypocritical.”

The problem for the Euro-Gaullists is that this approach will never command majority support within the EU, according to panel members at a recent Washington symposium on transatlantic relations. The foreign policy of the Bonn Republic initially won Germany plaudits, friends and goodwill, but then the Schroeder government began to follow Chirac's directions “meekly and weakly,” argues Ivo Daalder, a European analyst with the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to the Democratic presidential campaign. The extent to which Germany asserts its independence of Paris will determine its success in forging a meaningful foreign policy, Daalder suggested.

By contrast, a Euro-Atlanticist approach -– personified by British Prime Minister Tony Blair -– entails constructively critical engagement between the US and EU. The President-designate of the European Commission, José Manuel Barosso, and the EU Foreign Minister, Javier Solana, are also considered Euro-Atlanticists.

"Where would we be,” asked Blair, “as Britain or as Europe, if America disengaged from the world and said, 'Well, you guys go and sort out all the problems of the world'?” A confidante of the Prime Minister this week told the Financial Times: "What you need is democratic world opinion to be united in the pursuit of democracy. In various parts of the world, and the Middle East is one of them, while America has the power, Europe has immense amounts of areas of influence."

The next 12 months will test the strength and merits of the Euro-Atlanticist approach as the UK assumes the chairmanship of the G8 and the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2005. And this month's summit on Iraq in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh will confirm whether the challenges of the Middle East will provide a focus for a new transatlantic reconciliation or bring into relief new formations with Euro-Atlanticists and Euro-Gaullists choosing different bedfellows.

Middle East Reaction: from Despair to Democratization?
Disappointment and disbelief at the US election result were even more marked in the Middle East. Even normally sober commentators were driven to hyperbole. “The White House, Congress, the Republican Party, and much of the mass media are now firmly defined by an unprecedented coalition of mainstream conservatives, aggressive neo-conservatives, traditional pro-Israeli groups, and Christian fundamentalist evangelicals,” said Rami Khouri, executive editor of Lebanon's Daily Star. “This coalition has largely driven the post-9/11 Bush foreign policy of pre-emptive war, regime change, and active war on terror, with the Middle East as both testing ground and crucible.”

Despite many Arabs' disappointment with the election result, some observers believe that the in-depth media coverage and public discussion of the US campaign could have a long-term educational impact on the region. "Ten years down the road maybe there will be a growing appreciation in the Arab world for democracy and market economy,” says Abdel Monem Said Aly, Director of Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “America is the purest case you can find of these processes, and on a very grand scale."

The new administration must adopt "a more serious policy of active engagement with regimes and civil society actors alike,” arguesAmmar Abdulhamid, a Syrian social analyst. “Such a policy can produce the kind of win-win solutions that we so desperately need in the region."

The US election could also serve as a catalyst for locally-generated political change. "We shouldn't wait for change from outside. We are in a crisis and we should solve the crisis, whoever is in the White House,” argues Ahmed Abu-Haiba, a self-styled moderate Islamist playwright and television producer. “We have to stop waiting for salvation from outside, like a white knight or like a prophet who will have a magic solution."

One of the few expressions of delight and relief at the US election result came from Iraq, or, more precisely, Kurdistan. Oppressed nations understand President Bush's conviction that “today's twenty-first-century struggle is not a unique American neo-conservative creation, but a real global struggle between the idea and forces of liberation and the idea and forces of terror and darkness,” wrote Kamal Mirawdeli in the Kurdistan Observer.

Mirawdeli articulated the anxiety of many democrats in the region concerned by the “realist” sentiments articulated by advisers to Democratic candidate John Kerry who intimated that security would trump democratization in the region under their administration. Mirawdeli criticized Kerry for not saying “even one word about democratic change and liberation” in the campaign and suggesting that “the Democratic Party was keen once it won the election to ditch the whole concept, project and process.” But Mirawdeli overlooked Kerry's endorsement of the democracy agenda later in the campaign, and other indications of possibilities for a bi-partisan commitment to US engagement in support of democracy.

EU-US Complementary Strengths the Key to Mideast Reform,
USIP Reports
"Sustained transatlantic cooperation could contribute significantly to efforts to promote democratic reform in the Middle East,” according to a new report on European initiatives to promote regional change. “Shared strategic interests coupled with complementary strengths in the region hold the potential for more fruitful transatlantic engagement on democracy promotion,” argues Mona Yacoubian, author of the report from the US Institute for Peace. With the Middle East presenting common strategic threats -- terrorism, failed states, and the proliferation of WMD –- the promotion of democratic reform has become a key strategic priority for both the US and Europe.

In this view, there is a transatlantic consensus that reform should emerge from the region but that regional ownership can nevertheless be encouraged through external partnerships, as in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (or Barcelona Process) and the US Middle East Partnership Initiative. Both the US and the European Union are converging on the need for greater conditionality -– closer linkage between a state's performance on reform-related objectives and such benefits as financial assistance or access to markets. A common EU-US position on conditionality involving, for example, joint incentives (such as membership in the World Trade Organization) would enhance the impact of conditionality and reduce regional governments' ability to play the US and EU off each other.

The Barcelona Process, originally designed to promote economic reform and trade between the EU and its 12 Mediterranean neighbors, has yielded limited results in its secondary aim of promoting political reform, in part because of a “long-term, cautious approach in the name of preserving short-term stability.” Although the EU has since 2000 sought to enhance its democracy promotion strategy, efforts have foundered in the face of differing interests among EU member states, a reluctance to use conditionality and bureaucratic impediments. For example, the EU's protracted budget cycles preclude creativity and flexibility while decision-making is subject to veto by individual states.

The EU and US share important complementarities in promoting Middle East reform. Geographically, the EU has a comparative advantage in the Maghreb and the Levant due to former colonial ties, geographic proximity and its engagement through the decade-long Barcelona Process. The US has been more active in the Gulf countries, particularly with Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Programmatically, EU aid has been directed toward human rights, women's empowerment, judicial reform, and media freedom. EU ties with human rights groups and its commitment to cross-cultural dialogue with the region's civil society groups, including through the new Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, give it an advantage in this area. But Yacoubian doubts that it will function as a catalyst for regional NGO development since EU member states are pushing an apolitical agenda and eschewing a democracy promotion role for the foundation. By contrast, US democracy promotion efforts have focused largely on strengthening democratic processes and institution building, including political party development, election assistance and observation. US-funded programs have a bottom-up orientation, aiming to support NGOs at the grassroots.

Unfortunately, the USIP report notes, transatlantic frictions, particularly the clash between US "idealism" and European "realism," have “obscured these potential synergies.” The US preference for isolating "rogue regimes" contrasts sharply with EU faith in a “soft power” model of engagement, typified by the imposition of US economic sanctions against Syria shortly before the EU signed a major new association agreement with the Amman regime. “Transatlantic tensions over the issue of isolation versus engagement could seriously undermine joint reform-promotion efforts,” the report argues –- specifically in relation to Iran, Syria, and Libya.

[Note: the USIA's use of the "engagement versus isolation" paradigm borrows from the China trade debate in the US held in the 1990s. This forumlation overlooks the fact that pressure and conditionality on autocratic regimes are in fact forms of engagement --- with the people of a society, rather than merely with the regime.]

Rather than create additional bureaucracy, existing mechanisms should be exploited to foster the dialogue and consultation critical for identifying complementarities, the USIP report argues. Middle East democracy promotion should be added as a regular item on the annual G-8 and US-EU summit agendas, an annual report on the status of Middle East reform should be discussed at the G-8 summits and the US should be given observer status at annual Barcelona Process ministerial gatherings.

…. Carnegie Endowment Voices Differences About Transatlantic Dialogue
While some commentators have stressed the potential for complementary European-US approaches to Middle East reform, others are more negative. The Carnegie Endowment's Marina Ottaway not only questions whether US-EU differences can be bridged to allow a common policy, but goes so far as advocating a division of labor, with each side promoting reform in its own way. She suggests that transatlantic cooperation is likely to generate weak, lowest common denominator initiatives.

But others dissent from such proposals for new forms of unilateralism. A common agenda for US and European policies on Arab reform helps both parties avoid being played off against each other, says Volker Perthes, a Middle East expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. But, he cautions, the transatlantic policy debate and any common policy agenda for the Middle East must ultimately be determined by the needs of the region. Europe's Middle East policy on Arab reforms should not be made “an object of transatlantic psycho-therapy,” Perthes insists.

A more constructive division of labor could build on the fact that Europe “shares America's deepest values, such as democracy, individual freedom and human rights,” contends Harvard University's Joseph Nye. European support is vital in legitimizing US actions while European soft power has an important role to play in the struggle against terrorism, says Nye. “Opening Europe's doors to Turkey helps to strengthen one of the most moderate Muslim countries, and European aid for democracy reinforces America's objectives," argues Nye, formerly a member of the US National Security Council staff. In some cases, [as with Iran's developing capacity for nuclear weapons] there can be “a beneficial division of labor in which Europe's soft power and America's hard power combine in a good cop-bad cop routine.”

Dangerous Authoritarian Tendencies in Venezuela,
Democracy Advocates Warn
Venezuela risks violating international democratic norms and practices if it prosecutes civic activists accused of undermining the leftist regime of Hugo Chavez, democracy activists have warned. Over 70 leading democrats from around the world have expressed their concern at the prosecution of civic activists in a letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

A delegation from the US National Endowment for Democracy went to Venezuela last week to urge the government to drop conspiracy charges against Ms Maria Corina Machado and Mr Alejandro Plaz, leaders of the Sumate civic activist group. They face jail terms of up to 16 years on charges of "conspiring to destroy the nation's republican system" after receiving a $31,150 grant from the NED.

"In the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship. . . the prosecution against the activists would be moving ... closer to the authoritarian end," said NED Pesident Carl Gershman [Irish Times, "Venezuela is inching toward dictatorship, says US group," Nov. 11, 2004, subscription required] who met Venezuela's Supreme Court President and Attorney General to plead the case of Ms. Machado and Mr. Plaz. "If Venezuela carries through the prosecution of Sumate and the passage of a law that criminalizes democracy assistance, it will be seen to have crossed a line," he continued.

Former Czech President Vaclav Havel, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) joined dozens of other prominent democracy advocates as signatories to a letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez expressing concern over the "grave threat to democracy" represented by his government's prosecution of Sumate. Other prominent signatories include former Nicaraguan President Violetta Chamorro, former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Bulgaria Philip Dimitrov and Richard Goldstone, former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia.

"It has come to our attention that the leaders of Sumate, a civic organization, face criminal prosecution for accepting international assistance to help educate citizens about their rights under Venezuela's constitution," reads the letter. "As democrats, we are appalled that this group is being singled out for punishment, a group whose deep commitment to democratic principles we share and applaud."

The letter also criticizes pending legislation that could criminalize receipt of international democracy assistance, in violation of Venezuelan commitments under the Inter-American Democratic Charter and the Warsaw Declaration of the Community of Democracies: "We are equally troubled that this prosecution appears to be just the beginning of a larger effort to criminalize the receipt of foreign funds by Venezuelan NGOs. We agree with the denunciations of this proposed 'reform' of the penal code by human rights groups in Venezuela and elsewhere as a clear violation of international standards and practices."

"International democracy assistance in support of independent institutions of civil society is today an established feature of international relations," said the NED's Carl Gershman. "We hope that by alerting the Venezuelan authorities to the seriousness of international concern on the issues of Sumate and international democracy assistance, they will refrain from taking actions that would be counterproductive for everyone involved," he continued.

The full text of the letter and list of its signatories can be found in our Documents section, at the end of this issue of Democracy Digest.