“Everything about our world is changing – its economy, its technology, its culture, its way of living”, the Prime Minister told his Sedgefield constituents on the fifth of March. In a speech which was principally a detailed defence of his decision to take military action in Iraq – with just a casual reference to sweeping away the Westphalian system of statehood in place since 1648 – Tony Blair warned of the “mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the world in which we live”. In doing so, he also highlighted one of the major global issues to have suffered from post-9/11 neglect: the direction of globalisation.

Globalisation can be a force for tremendous economic, social and even cultural good, a case made by writers such as Jagdish Bhagwati, author of In Defence of Globalization, and bodies such as the International Labour Organisation with its report A Fair Globalization: Creating opportunities for all. Even Joseph Stiglitz, proponent of globalisation’s discontents, has written of the pressing need to manage globalisation in a way that benefits everyone. So the question is how this can be achieved when no one institution or country – not even the US – can control or shape the direction of globalisation on its own.

First, there needs to be a comprehensive reassessment of what globalisation is. This will require looking at it in its entirety and no longer seeing it primarily as a trade issue. Virtually every consumer item, industrial product, theory or idea produced in one part of the globe is now readily capable of being reproduced or transmitted to any other part. This is as true for Coca-Cola as it is for Pakistani nuclear know-how. So a new inclusive assessment of globalisation needs to encompass everything from the free movement of people, goods, jobs and capital around the world to the internationalisation of markets for common goods, such as education and health care. It needs to look at terrorism, tax and tourism, as well as international law, military technology and even democracy itself. Moving beyond a pure trade agenda will demonstrate that governments, NGOs and consumers are now as influential in driving globalisation forward as corporations have been in the past.

Second, it follows from this that the traditional antagonism between the Ayes and the Nays on globalisation is a bar to any progress. New coalitions and partnerships and new ways of thinking will be required to address this. All parties need to recognise their dependence on the others. In this world turned upside down, the challenge will be to marry peoples, businesses, governments and NGOs in new forms of civil, political and commercial partnerships which can harness the globalisation’s wild energies. Much of this is already occurring piecemeal with positive change springing from unexpected places. In France, the fast food giant MacDonalds pioneered the introduction of salads and fresh fruit to its menus. Distinctions between profit-making and non-profit-making enterprises and between public and private ownership are being challenged. Café Direct, the Fairtrade Company and one of the foremost social enterprises in the UK, and communist China’s largest computer chip manufacturer, SMIC, are preparing to list their shares in London and New York respectively. Anglo American is collaborating with the London School of Tropical Medicine and Johns Hopkins University in the US on the provision of HIV/Aids healthcare to its African workforce, of whom 30,000 are estimated to be HIV positive. These transformations should be welcomed and not greeted with cynicism about the corrupting power of the profit motive. A concert of globalisation’s major participants should not try to put the genie back in the bottle but should be better placed to enlist her in the cause of the common good.

Finally, a broad coalition of interested parties needs to re-establish the case for all that economic, technological and cultural change. The global audience, which is at turns sceptical of the benefits and fearful of the implications of globalisation, needs to be engaged. The advocates of the wider definition of globalisation must demonstrate that, through new coalitions of the eager, they can deliver together opportunities for better education, health care and security as well as greater wealth. That is the way to overcome the negative sentiment which dogs efforts to create a fairer and a more prosperous world.

Keith Didcock is Deputy Director of the Foreign Policy Centre and coordinator of the Keeping the World

Buried deep in the new draft European Union constitution is a single sentence that could bring California-style democracy to Europe. Article I-46 states that if you can collect a million signatures in favour of a policy, the European Commission must put forward a proposal to the Council of Ministers.

True, this is a very mild form of direct democracy, given that the council is at liberty to reject the proposal. However, if it did so, it would risk further accusations that the EU is anti-democratic and elitist. If you doubt the importance of the provision, consider that the UK delegation to the constitutional convention took it seriously enough to oppose it tooth and nail. In the end, it was included at the insistence of the German Green Party, which has a long-standing commitment to ‘people power’ (perhaps a curious stance, given that the German federal constitution specifically outlaws referendums because of their associations with the Nazis).

Before you get too excited at the prospect, note that, in California, those who make the greatest use of citizens’ initiatives are right-wingers and people who want to constrain state power. Among more than a hundred initiatives passed by Californians are the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ life sentences for repeat offenders; dramatic cuts to property taxes; and a ban on public universities using positive discrimination in favour of minorities. The famously quirky Californians have also passed proposals to outlaw the slaughter of horses for human consumption as well as the sale of horsemeat; to ban certain kinds of traps and poisons used for bear-catching; and to sanction the medicinal use of marijuana.

In 2003, Governor Gray Davis was unceremoniously booted from office by a popular vote triggered by a citizens’ initiative and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Austrian-born bodybuilder soon realised that his powers were hamstrung by the very direct democracy that had swept him to office. Voter-mandated initiatives, along with compulsory state spending on federal policies such as Medicaid and welfare, swallow between 60 and 80 per cent of the state budget.

Which proposals would find favour in Europe? We can hazard a few pessimistic guesses: a ban on genetically modified crops, perhaps; a reduction in the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers; a return of capital punishment; a ban on abortion; or a limit on EU spending. Certainly, it would not be hard for a big NGO or lobby group or a wealthy businessman to raise a million signatures from among Europe’s 480 million citizens. Yet, for all the dangers, citizens’ initiatives, if they take off, could open the EU to a new form of participatory democracy, and start to solve the legitimacy problem that has long plagued the European integration project.

Jack Thurston is a senior research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre and is writing a book about the Californian gold rush.

Published in The New Statesman on 30 August 2004, http://www.newstatesman.com

Though Egypt’s President Mubarak ridiculed the State Department’s Middle East Plan as “push-button democracy” that would “open the door to chaos”, and this year´s Arab League collapsed for daring to mention democracy in the mildest form, leaders that are bellicose in public are presiding over quiet reform. Despite Mubarak´s anger, he has freed the press by suspending jail terms for libel, and has even suggested that political parties will be legalised. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and others are reportedly preparing an Arab declaration to “spur individuals through participation” – shorthand for granting more political rights. Even in Saudi Arabia, it has been described as the “year of the petitions”, such is the increased pitch in lobbies to the King. Some Commentators have claimed that change is fomenting on a scale unheard of since the 1950s.

But at the same time as these home-grown trends, US politicians espousing a democratic revolution have never been more distrusted. The dilemma for President Bush is stark: how can he hope to promote democracy when (even before the war) only 11% of the people in the region trust him? Won’t any policy championed by the West become tarred with accusations of imperialism and backfire? Ironically, the Bush White House has made considerable progress on previous US administrations in correctly diagnosing the ills of the Middle East, even if their chosen course of treatment has prevented them from alleviating the symptoms. They rightly saw that the marginalization of young Arabs from the economic growth and political liberalization shared by the rest of the world was breeding terrorism. According to the UN´s 2002 Arab Human Development Report, 51% of Arab youths say they want to emigrate, and the Arab League have predicted that in ten years there unemployment will rise by more than 300%.

Despite Bush´s unpopularity and the universal cynicism about Western foreign policy, many young people see Western societies as attractive and full of opportunity. The USA, Japan, Egypt, UK and France were named by Young Arabs as the country’s they value most highly after their own – four of them among the world’s five largest economies. And almost 80% of Iranians were in favour of restoring ties with the United States even though less than 5% regard the US as friendly. Instead of preaching about abstract values, there is a whole range of services that the West could offer which would be promote reform and be appreciated in the region. An EU/US initiative to distribute tens of thousands of personal computers free of charge to Arabs under 25 could, for instance, improve the reputation of the West and kick-start some of the entrepreneurialism needed to promote growth. Though Arabs represent 5% of the world’s population, they make up only 0.5% of its internet users.

Education was described by the Arab Human Development Report as the Middle East’s “Achilles heel”. Funding should therefore be made available for free English lessons, Western government could give special incentives for American or European countries to invest in the region, and a regional venture capital fund could promote entrepreneurship and business development. But economic progress won’t be enough if the humiliation felt in the Arab world through political impotence is not addressed. The frustrations of living in a region where autocratic rule is aggravated by a feeling that Arabs are subservient to US interests. The grainy image of an Arab man at the end of a leash held by an American soldier corresponds powerfully to the perception that the region as a whole is tied to a leash that leads all the way to the Pentagon. And given the patronizing and righteous way in which we have communicated with the Arab world for so long, it is hardly surprising that this view is so widely held.

Iraq’s transition to democracy has been compared by the Bush administration to a child riding a bike who one day needs to take the stabilizers off, and any group opposed to the occupation have been branded as “jihadists” and “terrorists”. Though this might play well for Bush in his re-election campaign, lumping them all together dilutes the gravity of the term and makes it more difficult to resolve complex problems with the sensitivity required. There needs to be a change in language, and more of an effort to communicate seriously with Arab public opinion. Though the West pays lip-service to “dialogue” in the Middle East, the language of condemnation has been far more prevalent. The recent imposition of further US sanctions is hardly going to aid the forces of reform. Instead of proselytizing about the glories of the West, it would be better to discuss issues of mutual concern, such as development, and not just hold up the West as providing a model. It would be useful if successful societies in the region – like Malaysia, Bahrain, Dubai and Qatar, were used to discuss issues like educational reform.

Above all, the West needs to be seen as respecting the right of free speech even if it hurts. The closure of demagogic cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s newspaper on the grounds that it “incited violence” succeeded both in increasing his influence and deepening cynicism about US motives. It would help dispel these impressions if the EU, with less of a propagandist reputation than the US, were to fund internet access for schools and libraries in the region. Allowing democracy and free speech free rein in the Middle East is not without its risks in the short-term. But it is the only approach that has a change of success.

Rob Blackhurst is Editorial Director at the Foreign Policy Centre.

www.fpc.org.uk

In a month in which US hubris has met its nemesis in Najaf, Europhiles are indulging in some of their own. Speaking to the Financial Times, Gustav Hägglund, outgoing chief of the EU’s staff, speculated that Brussels may oversee a UN sponsored intervention in Sudan this year.

Sudan, as the former home of Bin Laden, is a better candidate for the “war on terror” than Saddam’s Iraq ever was. For six months International Crisis Group has been calling for action as some 670,000 people flee ethnic cleansing in the west of the country. While a defeat of ethnic cleansing in Africa ten years to the month after the Rwandan genocide would be a triumph for the nascent EU foreign policy – there are serious questions about how the EU should conduct an intervention. Robert Kagan’s formulation that Americans intervene leaving the Europeans to nation build afterwards, or ‘wash up’, no longer holds. Now, it seems Europe’s own dishes are mounting in the sink.

European countries did act decisively to stabilise both eastern Congo in 2003, in last year’s EU-flagged if largely French ‘Operation Artemis’ – and Kosovo last month. While German politicians refuse to send troops to Iraq, 2800 were deployed in Afghanistan. Every member state – Luxembourg included – has fielded soldiers abroad in the last five years. The EU is now committed to taking over security from NATO in Bosnia.

But it is the follow through of European operations that should be questioned. That European soldiers had to be rushed to Kosovo raises doubts about the efficacy of the 1999 intervention in the province. In the eastern Congo, the impact of the EU’s intervention was marred by poor co-ordination between civilian and military agencies.

In both cases, Europe has proved that it can shift troops to crisis spots, but that it can’t necessarily deal with the political and legal problems needed to build a lasting peace. Its new battle-groups, agreed as part of January’s hawkish European Security Strategy, will number up to 1500 troops each and be sustainable for 120 days: excellent for short-term operations but hardly proof of the EU’s commitment to nation building.

It is a long-term approach that Sudan requires. The current bout of violence follows some progress on peace talks between the countries’ factions – a theoretical ceasefire exists in the region of ethnic cleansing. If European governments are to give some substance to that ceasefire, they must also address the issue of what non-military support they will offer to move from a ceasefire to a more durable peace regime. Few would imagine that Sudan will be another Kosovo or Bosnia, in which soldiers are accompanied by a large-scale civilian peace-building effort. But if the EU’s intervention is to convince local leaders of their lasting interest in the country, their troops must be accompanied by at least a minimum grouping of human rights observers and rule of law monitors. The UN has launched a ten-day mission to investigate human rights abuses in western Sudan – only a much more durable monitoring presence can guarantee stability.

Soft security resources may now be harder to locate than military: there are growing fears in Brussels, for example, that having implemented police support operations in Bosnia and Macedonia, the EU lacks the manpower to mount similar activities elsewhere. Western governments will not easily provide vulnerable civilian peace-builders to Sudan after this month’s events in Iraq. The UN’s civilian capacity is already overstretched. If the EU sends soldiers to Sudan their presence may have little long-term impact – long accused of being too soft, we risk being seduced by the illusions of being hard.

The development community’s uneasiness about entering into dialogue with foreign policy makers is warranted. Much of the foreign policy community is instinctively inclined to prioritise stability or short-term political advantage even if development priorities are put at stake. Examples of double standards still abound. Valerie Amos’s pre-Iraq tour of African members of the Security Council (Angola, Cameroon, Guinea) and the promises of aid that followed was rightly received with scepticism. Likewise, the introduction of security conditionalities into decisions regarding development aid should also be questioned, particularly in the case of countries with poor human rights records such as Pakistan and Mauritius.

Yet, while it is easy to stereotype foreign policy specialists as incurable pragmatists, it would be wrong to ignore the more progressive among them. They are not necessarily fringe figures, after Afghanistan and Iraq, many European foreign policy analysts are forming an agenda that emphasises the importance of sustainable, domestically-driven development with strong civil society components. They have more common ground with the development community than the latter might allow for.

Indeed, the language of development is creeping into security analysis. Sven Biscop, a Brussels-based expert on European security, has argued that “rather than terrorism or WMD, the most important threat emerging from the new security environment seems to be the growing gap between the haves and have-nots . . . a gap which can best be expressed in terms of access to the essential global public goods.” Carl Bildt, the former UN envoy to Bosnia and now a member of the High Level Panel on UN reform, has emphasised the importance of convergence between security and development policies.

The key question that this raises is whether security is a precondition for development or vice versa. Javier Solana’s European Security Strategy, approved by the European Council in December 2003, explicitly puts security first. This choice acts as the basis for a strong endorsement for conditionality – creating new rifts with the development community.

Yet, before we condemn “conditionality” outright, we should see that it has multiple meanings. The development community has recently moved towards, not away from, certain conditional policies, devising complicated contracts for the implementation of aid agreements. For example, most development practitioners would agree that one of the strengths of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) is the mutual accountability framework that they provide. Likewise, by seeking to work increasingly with local counterparts in the developing world, international NGOs are having to move towards models of engagement which allow their partners to work independently while still fulfilling funding requirements and ensuring that core values are respected.

This form of conditionality relies on transparency, unlike political conditionality, which tends to be entwined with the obscurities of diplomacy. If we are to forge a new relationship between development and foreign policy, it is necessary for us to think how we can include political issues in binding contracts. Transparency should be at the core of these, marking a step-change in how we do politics with poorer states. To overcome vested national interests, it might be easiest to do this through organisations such as the EU rather than at the state level.

In a recent report from The Foreign Policy Centre, Julian Braithwaite (a senior adviser to Lord Ashdown in Bosnia) advocates the formation of EU contracts with problem countries. The aim of this strategy would be two-fold: it would help pool everything that the EU has to offer, including not only aid budgets but benefits falling outside the remit of development agencies such as visa-free travel and access to trade, giving them a clear identity and focus. The second aim should be to promote greater openness on the part of EU member states, subjecting individual member governments to peer review and annual audits.

This would be a radical departure. It might not only create new trust between the development and foreign affairs communities but – rather more importantly – between donor and recipient states. Aid practitioners should note that, in the UK, links between the Foreign Office and DfID are widely held to be improving. A new dialogue on development is emerging – it should not be stifled by dogmatism.

Richard Gowan is The Foreign Policy Centre’s Europe Programme Researcher.
Phoebe Griffith manages The Foreign Policy Centre’s International Development Programme.

Even the term Energy policy seems as steeped in the 1970s as smoky boardrooms and the closed shop. Mrs Thatcher downgraded the Department of Energy into an adjunct of the DTI for ideological reasons. The title smacked of economic planning, she felt, whereas our energy needs should be decided by the market. When Labour came into power in 1997 it seemed that this trend would carry on. Apart from a moratorium on gas-fired power stations to give coal a breathing space during a period of low gas prices, there was little market interference. With the reform of electricity trading arrangements, Labour were able to promise that that households would see a 10% fall in the costs of energy prices.

But two trends have conspired to give energy policy an unexpected rebirth. The experience of California showed the dangers of Governments prioritising low cost energy above all else. In 1996, California began liberalising its market, legislation was poorly designed in that it forced utilities to buy gas at increasing prices, but didn’t allow them to pass on the costs to consumers. As gas prices increased, they began to trade at a loss, and so, since most were relatively small businesses, they went bankrupt rather than continue to accumulate losses In the summer of 2003, similar trends could be seen across Europe. In Britain, the “dash for gas”, when new generators piled into the market to win spoils under the previous electricity trading arrangements, led to overcapacity. The government’s changes to electricity trading arrangements made energy prices plummet, which in turn is removing suppliers from the market as generators closed or mothballed power stations. Like in California during the nineties, there is no incentive to invest in new generation, apart from subsidised renewable power. As the BBC dramatically illustrated in their prime-time docu-drama “If”, there are real dangers that the lights could go off here.

The structural problems with liberalisation have been matched by a greater reliance on more unstable regions for our energy. The near exhaustion of Europe’s indigenous gas supplies will leave all European states heavily dependent on imported gas from potentially unstable regions – including Russia, the Central Asian Republics and the Middle East. This has given governments added incentive to consider dusting off home-grown forms of energy that are not at the end of a very long and unstable pipe-line. In the doomsday scenario, we may end up with fundamentalist regimes that are unwilling to trade with us. As Dan Plesch from the Royal United Services Institute has written: “imagine an Islamic Pol Pot intent on winning the clash of the civilizations. He would have every incentive not to sell us oil”.

September 11 led to a reappraisal in the US of their reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Risks of instability aside, the price of relying on autocratic regimes for oil supply became apparent. The costs of the Faustian bargain– in which the west tolerated states that repressed their own people as long as the oil taps were kept open – seemed too high when that repression bred terrorism that was directed at the West. The neo-conservatives shared an agenda with human rights campaigners on the left in their determination to wean themselves off a reliance on the Middle East. The economic costs of deploying US troops in the region are also becoming politically significant. The US Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Study in 2000 estimated that the costs of oil dependency were three trillion. And in the Democratic primaries, John Kerry got the loudest cheer of the night when he promised to give America the security of energy independence because “our sons and daughters should never have to fight and die for Mid-east oil”.

But the biggest reason for a renewed interest in energy policy is, of course, climate change. Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, warned recently that global warming was a greater world threat than international terrorism. Britain has taken an international lead by promising to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. But these good intentions fail to match the reality of what is happening to our power stations. Over the next twenty years, Britain’s non-carbon generating nuclear power plans will reach the end of their useful life and close, removing at a stroke most of the energy that is produced by clean sources. Currently, nuclear power provides 23% of the UK’s electricity needs. If left to the market, this will all be replaced by cheap fossil fuels.

The Royal Society has called for a new generation of nuclear power stations. But the green movement remain staunchly opposed, as Stephen Tindale argues in this exchange. The Government, too, has been lukewarm, given the huge costs and public relations obstacles of any move to nuclear. The 2002 White Paper on Energy suggested that the skill base of the nuclear industry should be maintained, but stressed that they would not push this option. It would be up to the market to decide. Instead, they have placed their faith in a big expansion of renewable energy. This will require a revolution: currently only 2.5 per cent of the UK’s electricity comes from renewable sources – even though there is a target to increase this to 10% by 2010 and 20% by 2020. Though there has been a quickening of progress, it is almost impossible to find an expert who believes this first target can be reached. However, as Stephen Tindale points out, massive increases in renewable capacity are possible. Already in Denmark 18% of energy comes from wind power.

Debates on energy often fail to consider what is happening in the rest of the world. Though nuclear power has an uncertain future in the UK, it is being actively considered in Finland, Brazil, Sweden and Japan and the US. Nuclear energy was the fastest growing source of electricity in the 1990s. But the immediate cost implications, together with the unresolved issue of how to permanently dispose of nuclear waste, means that few British politicians have been vocal in its support. This may change when Britain decides on a permanent waste facility, as the US has already done in New Mexico. But the question of whether Britain can afford to close its nuclear capacity if it is to reach its environmental targets cannot be ducked forever.

Rob Blackhurst, Editorial Director, Foreign Policy Centre.

The burning of Bush The US president was once known for his ability to unite factions but, with his foreign policy in tatters around him, he is dubbed the Great Polariser. What went wrong for George W. Bush and his advisers? And will he now focus on homeland defence, not overseas threats?

Washington had been preparing for their airborne invasion for months. Every 17 years, the cicadas descend on the nation’s capital like a biblical plague. They hatch, crawl out of the ground, mate, lay eggs – and then disappear for another 17 years. The Darwinian theorist, Stephen Jay Gould, says their evolutionary strategy of appearing periodically with overwhelming force and then retreating has allowed them to outwit their predators.

Observing them, a European in the imperial capital, I have come to regard their lurch from activism to retrenchment as a metaphor for American foreign policy. The French writer Raymond Aron – a rare intellectual of the right – described American policy as a series of “swings between the crusading spirit and a withdrawal into isolation far from a corrupt world that refused to heed the American Gospel”. Well, we’ve seen the orgy of activism: an increase in military spending to match all of the rest of the world; the bonfire of international treaties (Kyoto Accord, International Criminal Court, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The trinity of American military supremacy, unilateralism and pre- emptive war was heralded as a “Bush Revolution” that would define an assertive foreign policy for a generation. But now, just four years after the man was elected, an insistent beat of comment says that America could be on the verge of retrenchment, leaving its dream of an imperial foreign policy on the streets of Falluja.

A few blocks from the White House, 150 people gather to mark the first anniversary of the end of fighting in Iraq. It is a warm and sunny day in May. The speaker is a thin-lipped, grey man, an unlikely revolutionary – more John Major than Che Guevara. Douglas Feith, under-secretary of state for policy (number three) at the Pentagon, is one of the key architects of the Bush Revolution, a dogged, dependable ally of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Richard Cheney. The gathering is taking place at 1150 17th Street, a Silicon Valley for rightwing thinkers and home to the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard and the Project for the New American Century. Only a year ago the big joke making its way around the building was, “Baghdad is for wimps, real men go to Tehran”. But Feith isn’t here to lay out the next wave of intervention in the Middle East. Instead, he sounds defensive: “I think no one can properly assert that the failure so far to find Iraqi WMD stockpiles undermines the reasons for the war,” he says. He finds himself fielding questions about the need for United Nations involvement, strategies to get allies on board, the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the lack of planning for the aftermath of war.

Outside, in the political whirlpool of Washington and in the world over which he wishes to strengthen American hegemony, Feith knows that events are not going his way. On Iraq, the administration has turned to the UN, with President Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice both doing the rounds of European capitals asking for help. On Iran, it has tacitly supported the European engagement strategy. And on North Korea they are relying on multilateral six- party talks.

Part of the reason for this, says Joseph Nye, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is that the so-called Bush Revolution was based not on a single view of the world but a marriage of convenience between three schools of foreign policy, which for shorthand are linked to historical figures: the founding secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and presidents Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.

Nye, who coined the concept of “soft power” to describe the kind of culture, political and technological influence he thinks America should be projecting, says that the “revolutionary coalition” is unravelling: “There really isn’t a coherent Bush ideology but three strands of opinion competing with each other. That’s why the administration has been so divided. Look at Bush’s argument for intervening in Iraq. First there was WMD – which appeals to traditional security people. Then the connection with 9/11 – which appeals to assertive nationalists. And finally democratising the Middle East – which appeals to the Wilsonians (the right-wingers so-called after President Wilson).”

These groups, which stood together behind the invasion, are now falling apart and blaming each other as the situation in Iraq unravels and the Bush administration suffers in the polls. I decide to take an American journey, to observe the process close up.

Dallas, Texas. Downtown, the gleaming skyscrapers huddle together as if to draw strength from their numbers. All around this small copse of glass and marble (adorned with logos including AT&T, KPMG, Fannie Mae) is an endless sprawl of low-rise buildings that stretches as far as the eye can see – this is big-sky country. The journalist Robert Bryce tells me that Texas is the “front porch of the American psyche”, explaining that Texas was a nation before it was a state, and that “the Texas myth has become America’s myth. The Alamo, the Indian fighter, the cowboy, the oil man, the rough neck – all of these have become American archetypes.”

On a sleepy Sunday afternoon, I drive into a suburb not unlike the one that George and Laura Bush chose as their home when they settled here in 1989 to run the Texas Rangers baseball team. Making my way between the sprinklers, palm trees, neo-classical columns, manicured lawns, fountains, stone cladding and mock-Tudor thatched roofs, I realise that nothing is more than 10 years old – a symbol of growing Texan affluence and the demographic explosion. In this idyllic neighbourhood of McMansions or Faux Chateaux (as a non- Texan calls them) I find the stunning house of Jim Falk, the head of the Dallas World Affairs Council, who has organised a barbecue to introduce me to the pillars of the liberal and business establishment in the town that George W. Bush thinks of as home. Sitting by the pool eating chicken and chunky burgers laced with 15 different relishes, my fellow guests and I talk about how the Bush coalition was formed.

Lynn Minna, an attorney who is also head of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, explains that, “Dallas is the home of the Baptist church. A lot of business contacts are made in church. At the beginning of meetings of the chamber of commerce, you need to hold your hands and pray.” Bill McKenzie, a columnist on the Dallas Morning News, tells me how Bush has tapped into this seam of religiosity: “I remember interviewing Bush in 1997 about running for president and he said, ‘I don’t mean to sound too Presbyterian about this, but we are wrestling with whether this is what we are called to do. ‘ I don’t think he feels that God put him in the White House, but he does feel he has a purpose: to defeat terrorism.”

John Stephenson, who is the head of a Dallas law firm and an active member of the Dallas World Affairs Council, tells me I should remember that “foreign policy down here means Mexico”. Bush came to the office even less prepared on the world’s issues and problems than that other southern governor, Bill Clinton. But knowledge isn’t the point. The consensus among the guests is that it’s Bush’s way of doing business that’s important. If you know that, you can see the shape of his policies as president.

First, he’s willing to spend political capital. In February this year, journalist Paul Burka wrote in Texas Monthly that “once Bush decides to take a bite of the apple, it’s going to be the biggest chunk he can sink his teeth into. The argument that the status quo in the Islamic world would not change unless America did something to change it would have appealed to him. Of all the reasons to oust Saddam, the boldest was to change the paradigm.”

The second thing that everybody agrees on is his ability to focus on a single strategic priority to the exclusion of almost everything else. “As governor, Bush had an intense focus, he used to say ‘when everything is a priority nothing is a priority.’ When he zeroes in on something he does it to the exclusion of (almost everything),” says McKenzie. “I can only assume that he is focusing on stopping another 9/11 like a laser – and that includes pre- emptive strikes. And if the Europeans don’t get it,” he says, smiling sweetly at me, “that’s just too bad.”

The third poolside topic was Bush’s impatience with institutions and laws. Bush has a small-businessman’s attitude towards legislation and institutions: they are things to be worked around, and are rarely seen as the solution to any problem. “I think Bush is more entrepreneurial and the EU more statist, more process- driven. For better or worse Bush is intuitive, like a lot of entrepreneurs. He gets an idea and then it is: ‘Let’s go!’ You probably couldn’t find two more distinct approaches than Bush the wild catter and the European bureaucrat,” says McKenzie.

One thing his Texas friends don’t understand is what happened to Governor Bush. My fellow barbecue guests say that the single distinguishing feature of Bush as governor was his capacity to reach out across political boundaries. Burka in Texas Monthly wrote that “he had all the qualities of a great governor. He was a uniter, not a divider – a centrist who fought the extremists in his own party. I would never have imagined that the person I knew would have been characterised in a Time cover story as the ‘Great Polariser.'” Many people were shocked to see that he has become such a polarising figure, and one apparently careless of some of his conservative base’s concerns. Chip Pitts, a corporate lawyer, said: “A lot of conservative Republicans do care about deficits. Then you add in the Gulf War. ”

Chicago, Illinois. The elite in the Windy City share the view of foreign policy proposed by Alexander Hamilton, the founding secretary of the Treasury under George Washington. A New Yorker, he saw the world as a marketplace, in which foreign policy’s main purpose was to enhance America’s share of it. The Chicagoan corporate leaders are conservatives – nothing neo about them – who do not believe that human nature is essentially benign (or can be improved). The mark of their foreign policy is stability, and their most senior representative in the current administration is secretary of state Colin Powell.

In the wake of 9/11, Powell was at the heart of attempts to build a coalition for the invasion of Afghanistan and he played a central role in attempts to get UN backing for the war on Iraq. But he was also careful to distance himself from the zeal of his more assertive colleagues. I spoke in Chicago to Edward Djerejian, a former US ambassador to Syria and Israel, who is very close to Powell. “The war in Iraq,” he said, “will be debated in terms of whether it is a war of choice or necessity. There is no doubt that the Pentagon has taken the leadership over the reconstruction of Iraq. The responsibility should have been shared with the state department which would have avoided some of the mistakes that were made. But these voices were not heard. I feel very strongly that these people (civilian leadership in the Pentagon) just did not understand the political, economic and cultural situation on the ground.”

Richard Lugar, the senator for the neighbouring state of Indiana, is one of the long-serving Republican foreign policy leaders and is acting chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. He spoke for many when he said in a recent speech: “To win the war against terrorism, the US must assign US economic and diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority that we assign to military capabilities. We have relied heavily on military options and unilateral approaches that weakened our alliances.”

The head of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Marshall Bouton, tells me that “Midwesterners don’t care much for revolutions. The Midwest is like the fulcrum of the US body politic. The coasts go up and down but the Midwest tends towards centrist pragmatism.”

In the run-up to the election, Condoleezza Rice – at that stage a member of the Bush campaign team – wrote a famous piece for Foreign Affairs that captured the Chicagoan creed: “Foreign policy in a Republican administration will proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community. America can exercise power without arrogance and pursue its interests without hectoring and bluster.” Few policy statements have been so comprehensively destroyed by their author.

And the about-face was not restricted to Rice. John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, explains: “If you look at Cheney’s statements about why the US didn’t invade Baghdad in 1991 he sounds exactly like those who opposed the recent war in Iraq. There is no question that he has undergone a profound change in world view since then.”

One of the differences between these conservatives and the neo-cons is a dramatically different evaluation of US power. Mearsheimer takes umbrage at the description of the US by neo-conservatives as an “empire”. He even says the term “hegemon” is an overstatement. “The US is a hegemon in the western hemisphere but when you get out of the western hemisphere it is a more complicated world.”

The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations says the tide of opinion among the business community is turning. “A lot of people went along for the ride because they trusted Bush,” says director of studies Christopher Whitney. “Some of that has been eroded. I think the revolution is over unless Bush is suicidal.” Bouton says some of the council’s most popular speakers have been anti-Bush: “We had the largest turn-out for a single event with George Soros – 1,600 people came to hear him attack Bush’s foreign policy.”

The allies of Colin Powell are certainly feeling emboldened. One of his closest friends, speaking off the record, is jubilant: “One of the things that is clear is that the sun has set on the neo- conservatives. The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Feith group no longer has any tailwind. The realists or pragmatists led by Powell are reasserting themselves.”

The Metropolitan Club, Washington DC. It is as if a piece of London’s clubland in Pall Mall – complete with shabby leather armchairs and a billiard room – has been implanted in the heart of America’s capital. This gentlemen’s club, a block away from the White House, is a favourite haunt for neo-conservatives. They will often be found in the bar drinking Martinis and comparing notes about political developments. Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute explained who they are in “The Neo- Conservative Cabal”, a 2003 article in Commentary magazine, by pointing to their heroes: Henry “Scoop” Jackson (a Washington state senator), Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. “All three believed in confronting democracy’s enemies early and far from home shores; and all three were paragons of ideological warfare.”

Ironically, most of those who call themselves neo-conservative were opposed to Bush in the Republican primaries. They preferred John McCain, who remains their ideological soulmate. (As Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund, points out, it is a further irony that the people most opposed to Bush’s neo-conservatism wanted Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to pick McCain as a running mate.) Their main difference with the traditional conservatives is their willingness to see American power used to advance political goals. They were, for example, in favour of action in Kosovo when President Clinton was under constant attack from traditional conservatives in Congress. Second, they believe in the pro-active promotion of democracy and want to bring about the political transformation of the Middle East. This is what has led them to be described as the Wilsonians of the right, after the president who believed in “making the world safe for democracy”.

They do not, though, share all of Wilson’s beliefs: “To the extent that neo-conservatives are Wilsonians,” says Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University, “it is Wilsonianism minus international institutions such as the UN. This is because of their belief in the fundamental illegitimacy of the UN and related bodies, due in the first instance to their undemocratic character, but based also on the way they have treated Israel and the Middle East conflict.”

Within the administration, deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz is usually identified as the key actor, together with under-secretaries of state Douglas Feith and John Bolton, National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams and Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby. This is a very small proportion of the leading players, but the neo-conservative influence comes not from their position at the apex of the administration, but the power of their ideas, which offered an explanation for 9/11 and a bold prospectus for the future.

A senior administration official, speaking under the condition of anonymity, argues that the president’s embrace of Wilsonianism has increased the gulf between the US and Europe. “Europe is like America before world war one: an ‘it’s not our problem’ continent. They are a ‘status-quo, don’t change anything, so what if there is no freedom, so what if there is no human rights, so what if there is torture’ continent. So long as we can do a trade deal most Europeans are satisfied. Americans cannot accept this. That status quo is producing toxic threats. There is some short-term surgery we need to do, and then we can focus on the long-term.”

One evening at the Metropolitan Club, a couple of weeks after Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar was defeated in the elections, I met one of his senior advisers and a group of young neo-cons. Aznar’s adviser is still in a state of shock. His party has paid the ultimate price for its links with the Bush administration. He had been planning to come to Washington to discuss how Aznar, as the successful former prime minister of a victorious party, could come out to help in the Bush campaign. Now he fears that no one will want to be seen with a loser. But the discussion is practical and to the point. The neo-cons show their support; they are not fair-weather friends, they say, and offer their help – ideas for universities and think-tanks where Aznar could be based, speaking agencies, foundations. In a town where politics is a revolving door, they have plenty of experience in rehabilitating former politicians.

In many ways they are a deeply attractive group. They are highly intelligent, idealistic and loyal to each other and to those who take their side. They tend to be extremely well informed about the areas they are interested in and they use their knowledge to good effect. They are not creatures of fashion and will toil away on territorial disputes in countries such as Georgia or Moldova that have dipped out of the limelight. There is a studied modesty about their significance in the American political system that is married to a dogged devotion to the causes they espouse.

And, as the situation in Iraq lurches from crisis to crisis, they are quick to point the finger at other factions in the administration. Some, like the neo-con thinker Max Boot, have called for Rumsfeld to resign. Others have tried to pin the blame on Powell. At a recent seminar, former policy adviser and now columnist Robert Kagan said: “If the secretary of state had spent as much time speaking to allies as he did talking to (writer) Bob Woodward, we might have had some support on the ground.” In a stinging article in The Washington Post last month, Kagan hit out at the whole administration: “All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now. The Bush administration is evidently in a panic, and this panic is being conveyed to the American people.”

Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. On a cool, cloudy morning in the spring of 1998, Texas governor George W. Bush travelled through Silicon Valley to the Stanford campus for an introduction to foreign policy. The master of ceremonies was George Schultz, Reagan’s hawkish secretary of state, who had brought together half a dozen of his colleagues from the conservative Hoover Institution at the university (including Rice, then the Stanford provost). As he sat chewing the fat with these professors, Bush had still not formally announced his intention to run. The conversation meandered from one topic to another and, gradually, this group of foreign- policy hawks, who had been close to Reagan, discovered that they were growing to like the young Bush.

Many of these thinkers had as much belief in power as the neo-cons, but a less idealistic view of human nature. They have been labelled “assertive” or “Jacksonian” nationalists after Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US. Jacksonians have consistently supported spending for defence and have never been reluctant to use weapons once purchased. Yet their aim is to enhance American power, not to save the world.

Robin West, an oil man and former assistant secretary of interior in the Reagan administration, explains: “Cheney and Rumsfeld are different from the neo-cons. They have a lot of experience. Their attitude is that these are problems that have to be dealt with. If not now, when? If not by us, then by whom?”

In the Ford administration in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney led the offensive against secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente towards the Soviet Union – which they believed undersold American power. Morton Abramowitz, who served in the Pentagon at the time, is quoted as saying “I remember vividly (Rumsfeld) beat the pants off Kissinger.”

This history of hawkishness is confirmed by a very senior former official who looks back to the debates in the first Bush administration. “I think Cheney in the first Bush administration was the odd man out on Iraq,” he says. “He wanted to go into Baghdad but was surrounded by George Bush Snr as president, General Powell as chairman of the joint chiefs, Brent Scowcroft as national security adviser and James Baker as secretary of state. I’m not as surprised by his subsequent behaviour as some.”

James Lindsay, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who served on Clinton’s National Security Council, explains the difference between the Jacksonian and the Wilsonian strands of hawkish thinking: “If you want to understand what they believe in, look at what they do, not what they say. Within a year of the invasion of Afghanistan they introduced a budget with zero dollars for rebuilding Afghanistan. If they were interested in democracy they would have done it in Haiti.”

Although Jacksonians believe that international institutions can be more of a burden than a benefit, and that an America unbound will be better able to defend itself from terrorism, they are pragmatic enough to be willing to use institutions when it serves their purposes. “The administration does not say it will not work with others, but it has strong preferences about how to work with others,” says Lindsay. “First, it prefers coalitions of the willing to international institutions or permanent alliances. Second, it will go to international institutions, but it does so out of pragmatism to achieve a particular goal rather than out of principle – it is ‘multilateralism a la carte’.”

What distinguishes the Jacksonians is their belief in the extent of American power, and their optimism about its impact in securing US objectives. Stephen Krasner, a professor at the Hoover Institution and a close colleague of Rice, says the US has had the most successful foreign policy of any country ever. “Vietnam is the only major blip. The French have not won a war since Napoleon. The Germans have had a catastrophic foreign policy. This means that neither country is in a position to have great confidence in foreign-policy projects.” But, after the cold war, the Jacksonians have been concerned to maintain US power in the face of terrorism and rogue states. “What’s new is that there is a disconnect between underlying levels of power (gross domestic product, military power) and the ability to create massive disruption. A country such as North Korea with less than 1 per cent of the GDP of America, or a terrorist group, can create a strategic challenge killing hundreds of thousands or even millions with a conventional or dirty nuclear weapon,” says Krasner.

The Iraq war was a central plank of a new strategy of asserting American power in this unstable world. However, instead of broadcasting American power to the world, as the Jacksonians had hoped, the intervention has simply shown its limits by getting 130,000 US soldiers bogged down in a quagmire from which they cannot escape. The goal of this group was to keep the troop commitments down to the lowest level possible – which put them on a collision course with the Wilsonians, whose central goal was to build a democracy.

“Iraq looks extremely bad now and, unless the administration can make it look plausible, there will be very little appetite for military intervention,” says Krasner. “The single big question is, ‘will we be able to make Iraq work?’ and if that isn’t possible, then you will not see decisive interventions in areas where there is any ambiguity. You will only see intervention where there is a clear threat.”

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, argues that because of the central tension between the Jacksonians and the Wilsonians the Bush coalition has unravelled. “The neo-conservative agenda was a policy which required a huge commitment of resources. The Jacksonian agenda was about going in and coming out. In an odd way you got transformation on the cheap. That meant that you got not an imperial foreign policy, but a failed imperial foreign policy.” Instead of concentrating their fire on their Democratic opponents, the different groups in the administration seem to be trying to pin the blame for Iraq on each other – and one of the keys to understanding the durability of the revolution will be found in the result of those arguments. But perhaps the real answer to whether the Bush Revolution will continue lies in how far it has influenced his opponent.

The Rialto Restaurant, Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Kerry country – on the fringes of the Harvard campus, this restaurant is a magnet for political thinkers and doers. A government-in-waiting is assembling. Dinner is hosted by Nick Mitropoulis, the veteran Democrat organiser who was a senior aide to presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. The restaurant’s celebrity chef, Jody Adams, explains that her menu combines the best of local Boston food with European influences. Is this another metaphor, like the cicadas, for a future Kerry administration? Or does it signify that the pro- active, interventionist, pre-emptive stance that Bush took is now common currency between Republicans and Democrats?

It’s a question troubling many of these Democrats as they think through a return to power. Bill Antholis, director of studies at the German Marshall Fund who served on Clinton’s National Security Council, sets out the central dilemma: “The question that is really bubbling away among Democrats is, ‘just how different will we be able to be?'” Antholis’s conundrum has two components: the substance of policy and the style of diplomacy.

Kerry’s campaign has not challenged any of the fundamental principles behind the substance of US foreign policy. He has said frequently that he wants to make sure that America maintains its military superiority; he has echoed Bush’s boast that he will not ask for “a permission slip” from America’s allies to protect its security; and he has been forthright in his determination to carry on the war on terror. Graham Allison, professor of government at Harvard who served as assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration, agrees that a Kerry presidency coming in after 9/11 would necessarily share many of the features of Bush’s foreign policy. “Transatlantic tensions will get much worse whoever wins. The structural factors are negative: no common enemy; military competence on one side but not the other. Terrorism will divide more than it unites. Terrorists have discovered that telling people ‘stick with the Americans and you’ll be a target, keep your distance and you’ll be fine’ is powerfully persuasive.”

Strobe Talbott, president of The Brookings Institution and former deputy to Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, argues that after 9/11 Democrats shared the Republicans’ fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. “The Bush administration was right to identify Iraq as a major problem. A President Gore or McCain or Bradley would have ratcheted up the pressure, and sooner or later resorted to force.”

Tony Blinken, the Democratic director of foreign policy at the Senate, agrees: “There would be substantively very little difference between a Bush and Kerry administration. There would be stylistic differences. I don’t think Europeans should be under the illusion that there would be a substantive difference.”

Just how different will the style be? Larry Summers, president of Harvard University and former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, argues that the problems for the transatlantic relationship go beyond perceptions of threat to structural changes that started with the end of the cold war. “We have a problem of malign intent in Europe (a strategy of containing the US) and malign neglect in the US (a failure to consult),” he says.

Even under the Clinton administration, allies were not dealt with as equals. The model was to talk to everybody, make a decision on behalf of everybody – and then expect them to follow American leadership. Phil Gordon, who served on the National Security Council as director of European affairs under Clinton, says Clinton changed over time. “We came in talking about ‘assertive multilateralism’ and ended talking about the ‘indispensable nation’.”

This seems to suggest that the transatlantic tensions are like a Russian doll, with different layers of alienation piled on top of each other. Even if you remove the outer coating of the Bush Revolution, you will simply reveal another layer of tension caused by differing threat perceptions after 9/11. This in turn conceals the shift from a “great power” foreign policy to a “hegemonic one” that came with the end of the cold war. Finally, in the centre, you have the core difference between European and American societies on the role of government, religion and the use of force. These differences mean that a change of president will not change the underlying dynamics – even if the differences in style go a long way to removing the bad blood of the past year.

Although most people agree that the Bush Revolution has reached its high-water mark, they also agree that its central components could live on whoever wins the election in November. The grand strategist and historian, John Lewis Gaddis, argues that this is because the “Bush Revolution” was in fact no revolution at all. “Pre-emption, prevention and unilateralism are not new, but date back to the first homeland security attack on Washington in 1814.” Bush differed, and was revolutionary not because he was the first to have this vision but because he was the first man in the office who found himself with both the desire and the opportunity – after 9/11 – to implement this vision. And now he is finding that America lacks both the domestic will and the international support to pull it off. New research by the Texas-based political scientist, Richard Stoll, shows that Bush’s ratings on Iraq go down one point for every 30 American casualties.

This explains an emerging consensus that, having been through a period of Wilsonianism, America is about to retreat into isolationism. It will not be the isolationism of the past because America’s economy is too globalised and the country maintains troops in 130 countries around the world. Instead, it will see a less ambitious foreign policy, focused on homeland defence and dealing with threats rather than with spreading democracy.

The new multilateralism that is emerging is a sign of this. It is not a multilateralism of conviction, but a new strand of isolationism for an inter-dependent age. The new motto of the administration could be seen as a shift from “multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary” under Clinton, to “unilateral if we care about it, multilateral if we don’t”. On Iraq, Iran and North Korea, multilateralism is not driven by a desire to get things done but by a desire to get out. It is seen as a geo- political pause button, a way for America to regroup its political authority and rebuild its military resources.

The Europeans may have the moral high ground for now, but they should be careful what they wish for: this new humility in Washington may not be what they really want. Stanley Hoffman, European studies professor at Harvard University and a tireless critic of Bush’s policies, is very worried about the lessons that will be drawn from the failure in Iraq. “What I am sometimes afraid of is that many people who supported him and are now disillusioned could become isolationist: we should stop nation building, stop fighting wars. We haven’t got much from our allies – let them clear up the mess.” Michael Ignatieff, Carr professor for human rights policy at Harvard University, goes even further: “This is not a country of fervent, crusading imperialists. The extraordinary thing is the self-sufficiency of the country. The big fact about liberal interventionism in the 1990s was that it depended on American power and on the assumption that we could do it with impunity. Now we are back to Black Hawk Down days. It’s so bad in Iraq that it has made the case for liberal interventionism impossible.”

If they are right, the future for transatlantic relations is bleak. The core feature of American foreign policy that Europeans dislike (hegemonic leadership rather than a partnership of equals) will continue, while the benefits they draw from the transatlantic relationship (engagement to solve global problems) may not.

As Andrew Moravcsik, professor of government at Harvard, argues: “While Europeans focus on avoiding the next Iraq, they might find it is a Kosovo and that they want America to intervene.” If the US gets a really bloody nose in Iraq, they might not want to step in. It is a strange thing to imagine now, but Europeans may yet long for the activism of the “Bush Revolution”.

Mark Leonard, the director of the UK Foreign Policy Centre, is on a fellowship at the German Marshall Fund of the US in Washington DC. He writes in a personal capacity.

For more than a century, the accents of immigrants have altered America’s international voice. American Germans lobbied the US to stay out of the First World War; Irish Americans pushed for a settlement in Northern Ireland; anti-Castro Cubans living in Florida have successfully resisted the lifting of the trade embargo on their home country since the 1960s; and no presidential candidate can write his foreign-policy manifesto without running it past the Jewish lobby.

In the early 1990s, Croatians residing in Germany bounced the government into recognising Croatia’s independence, with enormous consequences for the future of Yugoslavia. In Australia, the Greek population has stopped the government from accepting a Macedonian embassy.

In Europe now, it is Muslims who influence the foreign ministries. Jacques Chirac gave France’s Algerian population as a reason why he could not support the war in Iraq; the backing of Turkish Muslims propelled Gerhard Schroder to victory in Germany’s photo-finish 2002 election. Ariel Sharon’s warning this month that Jews should leave France because of the strength of Muslim groups is a mark of the power attributed to people seen until recently as politically marginal.

Are Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims also beginning to influence foreign policy? They have usually delivered sackfuls of Labour votes with few questions asked. At the 1997 election, more than 80 per cent of British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis voted Labour. Now, even allowing for the peculiarities of by-elections, this month’s results in Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill suggest that the party’s Muslim vote has collapsed.

Last year, according to the Muslim Association of Britain, a co-ordinated Muslim vote decided a British by-election for the first time, helping the Liberal Democrats to overturn a Labour majority of 13,000 in Brent East. MAB bussed in supporters. In Leicester South, which is 20 per cent Muslim, the Labour vote fell 70 per cent.

Muslims born in the UK (labelled Generation M by the pollsters) are rapidly changing political allegiance. In solidly Labour areas, the threat of deselection has hung over pro-war MPs. Oona King was saved by the union bloc vote in Bethnal Green and Bow, while Jack Straw faced a restive constituency party in Blackburn. As an Asian Labour peer told me: “If Labour thinks that Muslims support it as long as it visits mosques and the Prime Minister says that he reads the Koran, then they’ve got another thing coming.”

ICM polling last year showed that, unlike white Britons, Muslims list international issues as their highest priority. More than 79 per cent said they were “very concerned” about the dispute in Kashmir, a higher score than for either education or health. In Birmingham, home of the world’s biggest expatriate Kashmiri community, two city councillors were elected in 2003 from the single-issue People’s Justice Party, demanding that the government exert stronger pressure on India.

But the Labour MP Keith Vaz, who supported the war and whose constituency borders Leicester South, says: “Iraq was the first instance of Muslims voting along foreign-policy lines in my 18 years in parliament. Even the problems of Kashmir, or the Rushdie affair, or Palestine, never translated into significant domestic votes.”

General election turnouts have fallen, but Muslims are now more likely than average to vote. Ahmed Versi, the editor of Muslim News, says that “the Muslim young are more likely to vote than their elders”. So voters who were once invisible have become an electoral prize, and the parties have responded accordingly. The Lib Dems have rebranded themselves as the “natural party” for Asian Britain, and George Galloway’s Respect party has pitched for the Muslim vote.

Given that neither of these parties will form the next government, has this clout been noticed where it matters – in Downing Street and the Foreign Office? The Iraq war aside – on which Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain says ministers “listen but do not hear” – Muslim pressure has brought low-key successes over the past decade. Sacranie claims the UN intervention to protect Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990s as a success, and argues that Muslim pressure encouraged Tony Blair to push a solution to Palestine when the Bush administration had given up.

However, Muslims still lack formal structures. The new lobbying group Muslims for Labour, set up as an attempt to counter-balance Labour Friends of Israel, lacks the latter’s influence and its status as a favoured club for young Blairites.

Although a specifically Muslim party would have no chance in a first-past-the-post system, some Muslims favour a campaigning group on foreign-policy issues more willing to bare its teeth than the consensual Muslim Council of Britain. This could work, as foreign policy remains a low priority for most non-Muslim voters. A good analogy is with Cubans in Florida and New Jersey: though most Americans say they favour lifting the embargo, the Cubans prevail because they feel more strongly about it and are willing to switch their votes on the issue.

The difficulty here is to co-ordinate the demands: Britain has Muslims of 56 different original nationalities, and who speak more than 100 languages. The most effective route may be to lobby non-Muslims around limited aims. Just as the pro-Israeli lobby in the US remains influential because many non-Jews identify strongly with Israel, so many Britons share Muslim views about the recklessness of war in Iraq and the dangers of unilateralism.

Rob Blackhurst is editorial director of the Foreign Policy Centre.

Published in the New Statesman on Monday 26th July 2004 http://www.newstatesman.com

Lance Armstrong is poised to claim a unique sixth victory in the Tour de France. He shares his achievement of five wins with four other riders, and many Europeans find it galling that an American (from George Bush’s home state of Texas, no less) is set to surpass the European quartet of Merckx, Anquetil, Hinault and Indurain.
Transatlantic rivalry is only part of the story. Some cycling fans object to how Armstrong’s nine-man team operates with the sole purpose of ensuring their man will be wearing the winner’s yellow jersey as the riders enter the Champs Elysées tomorrow at the end of the three-week race. Europeans like the idea of the noble individual, striking out from the pack to ride heroically and alone over the mountains and through the vineyards to claim his prize. Merckx would attack, attack, attack, never content with second place. This year the colourful French rider and six times king of the mountains Richard Virenque chose Bastille Day for a daring 130-mile breakaway, to the delight of the home crowd.

By contrast, Armstrong’s rides are carefully calculated; he only unleashes his speed and endurance at key moments, to maximum tactical effect. On the fast, flat days he will shelter behind his teammates, in the mountains he will use them as pacemakers. In fairness, each of the teams in the tour has a hierarchy. But Armstrong’s team has taken things to a new level, reflecting the special American love affair with team sports.

The three most popular American spectator sports are baseball, basketball and American football. Big hitters like Babe Ruth, gravity-defying geniuses like Michael Jordan or quarterbacks like Joe Montana may have star status, but it’s the team that’s the thing. Teams practice drills and set-plays, each member has clearly defined roles.

Working cooperatively, sacrificing your own glory for the greater good, a whole greater than the sum of its parts doesn’t fit with the view of America as a nation of rugged individualism. De Tocqueville, to whom Europeans look for insights into the US character, remarked upon the abundance of voluntary “associations” (churches and unions) that performed many of the roles of the larger, more intrusive European state.

Sociologists like Robert Putnam have recorded the collapse of these civic institutions in recent decades. But even if Americans are going down to the mall and – as Putnam famously observed – “bowling alone”, on TV they still love team sports. Perhaps they find them comforting precisely because they reflect qualities of cooperation and social solidarity that are missing from the dog-eat-dog capitalist economy. There is something almost socialist in the way that recently graduated college players are allocated to the professional teams: the worst-performing teams get first choice of the best players, so as to even up the competition. And maybe it is because of our more uniform, egalitarian societies that we Europeans are attracted to the idea of the individual genius outshining the rest through natural ability (though not through hard work, that’s so American).

For Americans the team is about working together for a common aim, and that common aim remains distinctively American. It’s not playing beautiful football, or helping the lesser players rise up to the level of the best. The goal is winning – at all costs. Armstrong has a single-minded commitment to a single goal: winning the Tour de France. He is an outstanding athlete and his team has been built around him, their egos subjugated to the task at hand. They are drilled, disciplined and dedicated. Now, there’s something very American about that.

Published in The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk