WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- President George W Bush, currently facing angry demonstrations in Argentina, certainly has his problems, with the federal budget in deep deficit, a senior aide and his party's most powerful leader in Congress both indicted, and the national pension system crumbling around him.
But by comparison with the main European countries, Bush is in clover.
Paris has been wracked by a week of spreading riots by its restive and impoverished immigrant community. Nearly two months after the elections, Germany still does not have a stable government. And in Britain, Tony Blair has just lost his closest ally in the Cabinet, and his government survived defeat by a single vote after scores of his members of Parliament rebelled and left his anti-terrorism plan eviscerated.
Oh yes, and the 25-nation European Union still cannot agree on a budget, and their internal divisions are threatening to collapse the world trade talks because, in the words of Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer, "French farmers are holding the international trading system to ransom."
Europe is a problem, for its own inhabitants as much as for the Americans, Japanese and other members of the global trading community what want to make the current Doha Round a success. And the coinciding crises in Britain, France and Germany, and at the world trade talks, may have their own national peculiarities, but they have a common root. Europeans are becoming deeply defensive about the way the world is changing, apparently to their detriment, and are reacting strongly against the various currents in the grand tide of globalization.
In France, the immediate problem is immigration and its discontents. The troubles started when two young blacks were electrocuted when they climbed into a local transmission sub-station. It has since spread, with hundreds of cars burned and gunshots fired Wednesday night, and while it started among African immigrants, it is now spreading into the far larger and more restive Arab community who make up the bulk of the estimated 6 million immigrants (including their French-born descendants) in the country, some 10 percent of the population.
Because of the tight labor market regulations in Europe, and the high cost to employers of social security payments, it is difficult for the unskilled to find regular work. Young black and Arab immigrants have unemployment rates of over 50 percent in some of the grim "banlieu" housing estates around Paris. The tensions have not been helped by the way Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy calling the demonstrators and rioters "scum," eager to maintain his tough reputation on law and order as he battles for the political succession to President Jacques Chirac.
In Germany, the fear is the traditionally generous welfare system and job security are being undermined by low-wage competition. Unemployment stands at 11.6 percent, which means 5 million out of work in a population of 80 million, and while German corporations are reporting record exports and rising profits, this is not paying off in jobs. German companies are investing in low-wage countries abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe, while low-skilled Germans fear that what jobs remain are going to immigrants.
This explains the revolt now under way inside the Social Democratic Party, after its leader Gerhard Schroeder resigned when he narrowly lost the September election to the center-right Christian Democrats led by Angela Merkel. Schroeder's successor, Franz Muntefering, who was to have become deputy Chancellor in a grand coalition of SPD and CDU, resigned after the left-wing revolt. Judging this was a mess he was better avoiding, the conservative head of Merkel's Bavarian allies, Edmund Stoiber, decided he would not become Economics Minister in the government and stayed in Bavaria.
So Merkel's grand coalition now looks very fragile, and the SPD has shifted sharply to the left, opening the prospect of a hard-left coalition with the ex-Communists of East Germany's Party of Democratic Socialism. Germany's partners, allies and investors would not enjoy seeing Europe's largest economy governed by the most protectionist and statist left-wingers Europe has seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They loathe globalization almost as much as they dislike the Bush administration, and their policy response would be to try and seal off Germany and Europe from its threats.
In Britain, the worry is partly terrorism and civil liberties and partly immigration, all wrapped up in a general sense of discontent with the Blair government that after more than eight years in office, seems tired, grumpy, quarrelsome and increasingly guilty of overstaying its welcome. Blair himself has lost much of the public support and trust he once enjoyed, largely because of his decision to join the unpopular President Bush in what most Brits tell pollsters was the "unjustified and illegal" war in Iraq.
The country is still trying to tackle the shock of the London Underground bombings on July 7, when 52 people were killed in attacks by British-born and British-raised Islamic extremists, the children of immigrants of Asian descent, who had decent educations, free health care and apparently enjoyed all the benefits of growing up in one of the world's most tolerant, democratic and prosperous societies.
That was one shock, and the Blair government's highly controversial anti-terror bill was a response to it. But its proposals to give ministers the power to detain people without trial for up to 90 days and to make "incitement" or "glorification" of terror into a criminal offence have rocked a people who always thought that Britain with its 800 year-old Magna Carta had virtually invented civil liberties. That was why Blair's majority in the House of Commons fell to a single vote this week.
In short, the theoretically separate issues of terror and immigration and low-wage competition and a welfare state that is less and less affordable are becoming linked together in Europe, as symptoms of a fundamental change that threaten European comforts and security, and can all be lumped together as the menacing and ugly face of globalization. And this is a much more profound and enduring political problem than the troubles faced by Bush, whose country's culture is more flexible and welcoming to (legal) immigrants and to the economic and social challenges of globalization.
