Charlemagne: All aboard the freedom train?

How Americans and Europeans might come together over spreading democracy in the Arab world

THE American administration, with its taste for inspiring sound-bites, calls it the “freedom agenda”. The European Union, with its preference for bureaucratic obscurity, calls it the “Barcelona process”. But both are, in their different styles, talking about the idea that they should find ways to promote democratic change in the Middle East. After the London bombings, could this become a common theme that helps to reunite hitherto squabbling transatlantic partners?

Recent history is not encouraging. American officials still shudder over the sudden haste with which Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq soon after the March 2004 election that followed the Madrid train bombs. They know that the divisions and ill feelings provoked by the Iraq war remain. Yet at a dinner in Brussels a few days after the London bombings, organised by the German Marshall Fund, Daniel Fried, the American assistant secretary of state for Europe, struck a more hopeful note.

Mr Fried said that the Bush administration had come to a settled view that an essential component of winning the war on terror was to press for social and political change in the Islamic world. The old emphasis on stability and oil, he said, had given way to a new emphasis on change and democracy: “the freedom agenda”. The administration is clear that it needs European support for this project because, as Mr Fried puts it, “the United States and Europe have political legitimacy when they act together.” He cites the ending of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon as a model: Americans and Europeans (with France in the vanguard) worked closely together to push for the withdrawal.

There are signs that European thinking on democracy in the wider Middle East is changing. One senior EU diplomat thinks that “a resurgence of terrorism is likely to make Europeans more receptive to American-style arguments that real stability can only be produced by internal change in the societies that produce terrorists.” He admits that the Barcelona process has been timid in promoting this, concentrating instead on such micro reforms as helping to set up proper commercial courts. But he adds that Europeans have good reason for caution. “Trying a few radical experiments to see if you can turn Morocco into an all-singing, all-dancing democracy might be fun if you are on the other side of the Atlantic. It's a bit different if you are in Spain, and living just a few miles across the water.”

This longstanding European fear that an American-led crusade for democracy in the Middle East could end up replacing bad regimes with worse ones, or just with violent anarchy, has been reinforced by the war in Iraq. Only the most diehard America-haters now actually want the Americans to lose: the stakes are too high for that. But Iraq is exhibit one for those Europeans who like to argue that American naivety about democracy in the Middle East could lead to disaster - and that European countries' proximity and large indigenous Muslim populations mean that it is they who would suffer most from the blow-back from any such disaster. For example, Francois Heisbourg, now at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, argues that America has inadvertently turned Iraq into a “jihad factory”.

George Bush's oft-repeated statements that, on the contrary, “freedom is on the march” in Iraq only increase European anxiety about what the “freedom agenda” might entail. One veteran British diplomat makes the traditional argument for the devil-you-know: “get rid of the House of Saud”, he predicts, “and you will be screaming for them to come back within months.” A senior American official retorts that “we don't want to get rid of the House of Saud.” But this produces yet another reason for European scepticism; the feeling that ringing moral commitments will quickly be compromised by America's strategic and other interests, such as oil supplies or the protection of Israel.

It is not just the Bush administration's closeness to the House of Saud (or to Israel) that raises eyebrows. Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has become a vociferous critic of what he regards as American (and British) complicity in tyranny in Central Asia, because governments such as Islam Karimov's in Uzbekistan remain such useful allies in the “war on terror”. Even the Poles, who take America's commitment to liberty much more seriously than their world-weary western European neighbours, complain that Mr Bush has been too soft with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, over Chechnya.

Europe awakes

Yet even as Europeans remain adept at picking holes in grand strategic visions emanating from Washington, some American arguments about the nature of radical Islam are beginning to resonate more widely. After the London attacks, there is less talk of understanding the despair that motivates suicide-bombers, and more recognition that, as Tony Blair has put it, there is an evil ideology underlying the attacks. The idea that Europeans have been blind to the threat that radical Islam poses to their own societies, which is now a commonplace of American conservative discourse, from Bernard Lewis to Francis Fukuyama, is also being taken much more seriously in Europe. It has become conventional wisdom in the Netherlands that multiculturalism has failed, and that radical Islam is a threat to Dutch society. And few French politicians believe that their opposition to the Iraq war has made their country immune from terror.

All this debate and argument across the Atlantic may yet form the basis for a new understanding. After Iraq, the Bush administration has become more inclined to acknowledge that it cannot remake the world on its own. After London and Madrid, most Europeans realise that they now face a threat from radical Islam. If the two sides can overcome their past mutual suspicions, they might once again unite to face the new common enemy. They might even agree that spreading democracy is the only lasting way of defeating it.

Commentary features suggests that the Americans and the European might come together over spreading democracy in the Middle East and the rest of the Arab world.