A Tour Without A Trip

By Michael Elliott

This just in: Last week George W. Bush was the most popular political leader in Europe. That, at least, is one interpretation of the demonstrations in the Swedish town of Goteborg. On the day of Bush's visit for a summit meeting with the leaders of the 15 nations in the European Union, the most significant street protest was a mass mooning of the President. But once Bush had left for Warsaw, and then for a meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the mood turned ugly. The now familiar demonstrators against globalization tossed cobblestones at police, burned cars and smashed windows. Unable to move freely through the streets, the European leaders were forced to hold their customary dinner in the cordoned-off conference center rather than a classy restaurant. And police opened fire with live rounds, wounding three protesters, one of them seriously.

So much for the values gap. In the run-up to Bush's trip, commentators had enjoyed viewing a supposed chasm between the sensibilities of modern Europe and those of the U.S. To believe some, one side of the Atlantic opposed the death penalty, was committed to arms control and wanted to save the planet; the other executed people for fun, was looking forward to a new arms race and thought global warming a minor inconvenience compared with doing without its SUVs. Strange, then, that the first live bullets used in the wave of recent protests against global capitalism should have been fired not in Seattle or Washington but in peace-loving, tree-hugging, social-democratic Scandinavia. Americans, it turns out, do not have a monopoly on mindless violence, nor Europeans one on the Cartesian application of enlightened reason to the great issues of the day.

Even before the riots, Bush's staff had drawn the appropriate conclusions. "I don't think there is a values gap," said a senior Administration official who was on the trip. "The shared values between Americans and Europeans vastly and dramatically outweigh any differences. There are anti-death penalty Americans; there are people in the U.S. who think [the Kyoto protocol on global warming] was a great thing." Antony Blinken, a staff member on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, points out that it wasn't that long ago that Europeans and Americans had serious disagreements over basic matters--like the modernization of nuclear arsenals in Europe. After the cold war and the triumph of global capitalism, he says, we live in a period marked by the "narcissism of small differences."

But Blinken was talking about Washington's old allies in Western Europe. The surprise of the trip was the apparent warmth between Bush and Putin. Sure, both sides wanted their first summit to be a success and so played down their old disagreements on missile defense and on Bush's determination to extend NATO membership to the Baltic states--and hence to Russia's border. But the post-meeting atmosphere was cozier than many had expected. Bush said he found Putin to be "very straightforward and trustworthy." "Everybody tries to read the body language," said the President. "Mark me down as very pleased." Putin, for his part, said that "the differences in the positions of our countries are not of a fundamental nature" and that he was delighted that Bush spoke of Russia as a partner and potential ally.

In such a world, where disputes are between friends, old or new, Bush would have had to do something dramatically awful for his trip to be marked a failure. He didn't. Indeed, so low were the expectations of him among parts of the European media that merely by showing up and speaking English--never mind the basic Spanish that he used when visiting Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in Madrid--he would have been judged a resounding success. He sailed over that low bar. From the U.S. standpoint, the week's only truly sour note had nothing to do with the President's performance. It came, rather, with a surprise announcement by Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric Co. The conditions that the E.U.'s competition authorities wished to place on GE's merger with Honeywell International, Welch said, were deal breakers. Bush may have sympathized, but he did not make the GE deal part of his official business.

By and large, those meetings went as well as could be expected. Bush's advisers thought discussions with NATO allies in Brussels were a success. NATO's drab offices are the closest thing to home turf that an American President ever finds in Europe--a place where the history, might and technological prowess of the U.S. give it an unrivaled position of leadership. Bush made his case for missile defense with vigor and without notes, and at the press conference following the meeting, seemed pumped and confident. To an extent, that makes sense. He has won converts in Europe; the governments of Spain and Italy--as well as new NATO members Poland and Hungary--are all inclined to support Bush's belief that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a tired relic of the cold war that deserves no more than a decent burial.

The discussions in Sweden, at the semiannual summit between the E.U. and the U.S., were bound to be trickier--and were. On their own territory--Bush was the first sitting U.S. President ever to visit Sweden--the Europeans set the agenda, which consisted mainly of beating up on Bush for his decision to junk the Kyoto accord. Climate change dominated both the formal meeting and the dinner that evening in Goteborg's town hall. Bush, said an Administration official, found the dinner a "long two hours."

He had better get used to it; with European leaders under electoral pressure to show green hearts, global warming will feature at summits for years to come. And so, for all the grips and grins in Ljubljana, will missile defense. Bush has asked Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to work with their Russian counterparts on a "new security framework." Those talks won't be easy; Washington may have changed the dismissive, almost contemptuous tone in which it discussed Moscow earlier in the year, but Putin has deeply held positions on missile defense and NATO enlargement--and powerful constituencies who will see that he sticks to them.

So future meetings between the Americans and the Russians are certain to be tougher than the one last week, and Bush's relationship with the West Europeans will continue to have its fraught moments. The values gap between Europe and the U.S. may be smaller than many think, but there are two senses in which the Atlantic dialogue is moving onto new and, for Americans, unfamiliar ground. The first involves the growing economic power of the European Union. Welch allowed that he was "surprised" by the demands made by Mario Monti, the E.U.'s antitrust commissioner, which only goes to show that one of America's most respected CEOs can't always be well informed. The E.U. has been exercising jurisdiction over mergers between non-European firms for more than a decade, and under Monti's leadership has taken an aggressive line on anything that seems to dilute competition. That's part of a larger picture. Whether it's in world-trade talks, international rules on computer privacy or standards for food safety and labeling, American companies are increasingly finding that the rules of the globalization game are at least as likely to be set in Brussels as in Washington.

More significantly, U.S. policymakers, for the first time, have to cope with "European" attitudes toward economics, the environment and even defense that is just that--European. The E.U. is slowly but surely turning into something less than a nation state but much more than a trading club. Even its leaders who are "pro-American"--like Aznar--have staked their future on turning the E.U. into a true political force.

Americans will find it easier to cope with such a development if Europeans are modest about their own habits. Whatever may have been true before last week, this is hardly the time for Europeans to claim they are more virtuous than the gun-loving, arrogant Americans. Ask the police and the demonstrators in Goteborg what they think of European values.

--With reporting by James Carney with Bush, Jay Branegan and Massimo Calabresi/Washington and James L. Graff/Goteborg

With reporting by James Carney with Bush, Jay Branegan and Massimo Calabresi/Washington and James L. Graff/Goteborg