The results are impressive: nearly 500,000 new jobs in France in the past 12 months and more than a million jobs created in Britain since Blair, the leader of my party, came to power. Even in Germany, still shouldering the burden of its unification with the basket-case communist economy of East Germany, the unemployment figures are coming down. Just as a rosy economic picture helped Bill Clinton win re-election four years ago, this solid economic performance on the other side of the Atlantic leaves the center-left leaders of the new Europe looking good as they face their electorates over the next 24 months.
Europe isn’t America–and vive la difference–but the United States and Europe have more basic economic ground rules in common today than at any other time in history. Surely, then, Europe’s center-left triumvirate is rooting hard for the Democratic team of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman? Well, it’s not that simple. This is one American election in which Europe’s governing politicians are not going to get deeply involved. With one eye on the polls that show the election could be nail-bitingly close, the men who run Europe’s largest governments are assuming a posture of nonengagement. As Chancellor Schroder said last week, “I don’t see any big difference between the candidates in their foreign- policy approach to Europe.”
In their hearts, of course, all pillars of the new European left would prefer to see a President Gore developing the new politics–as Harry Truman did in the postwar years in consolidating the New Deal after Franklin Roosevelt. Clinton is revered for having brought to the Third Way dialogue an American perspective that harks back to FDR: a way of governing that balances social justice and economic dynamism–and stands as a counterpoint to the ideal epitomized by Margaret Thatcher’s famous saying, “There is no such thing as society.” The affection for Clinton is not just sentimentally partisan. Though hardly of one mind politically, the new generation of European leaders has endorsed French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s riposte to Thatcherism, “Yes to the market economy; no to the market society.” Which is to say: we recognize capitalism’s strengths, but we want to harness them for the good of as many people as possible.
But the lesson of 2000 is that foreign-policy experts in Europe can be clear-eyed in their appraisal of would-be President Bush. They remember the strong support his father, George Bush, gave to the process of European integration as vice president in the 1980s and also during his term as president. The younger Bush’s march to Philadelphia and beyond is not terribly out of sync with the European center-left. He speaks Spanish to appeal to Hispanic voters, put gays and single mothers on his convention stage, offers the prospect of places in his cabinet for African-Americans like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and, as governor of the border state of Texas, adopted what were considered to be fairly enlightened policies vis-a-vis immigration, legal and illegal, from Mexico.
Not surprisingly, the American Republican Party’s sister parties of the right in Europe are not getting any benefit from the Bush campaign. In 1992 Clinton demonstrated that there was a future for nonconservative politics. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” may or may not convince American voters in November, but it is light-years away from the current political discourse of European conservative parties. In Germany, in fact, after Schroder suggested adopting a U.S.-style green-card system to admit Indian computer specialists into the country, the opposition Christian Democrats ran a campaign under the slogan “Kinder statt Inder” (“Children, not Indians”). In Britain the Conservative Party has run an aggressive campaign against asylum seekers and against reforms to extant anti-gay legislation.
Europeans can be forgiven if it looks to them as if Bush, in order to be elected, is engaging in a little political cross-dressing: could he be adopting the style of the political clothes hanging in Bill Clinton’s Third Way wardrobe? Needless to say, there are important policy differences of substance–notably the further fiscal privileges for the rich proposed by the Republicans in contrast to the more balanced economic-cum-social platform announced by Gore. Still, center-left government officials in Europe are unlikely to be drawn into the open on their preference for the next president of the United States. Whoever wins, the new ideas that won elections for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and that have been absorbed by Europe’s policymakers will continue to dominate transatlantic politics for the foreseeable future.