PARIS, April 27 (UPI) -- To travel in these electioneering days between the cities of Paris and London, supposedly partners in the European Union, is to move between two political and ethnic continents.
In France, which faces a closely fought referendum vote May 29 for or against the draft new constitution of the European Union, the fellow Europeans are campaigning. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder brought a flock of his government's ministers to Paris this week for a joint Cabinet meeting with their French colleagues and a flurry of media events to tell French voters Europe was counting on them.
"Europe needs France, and France needs Europe," Schroeder declared. "Without France "the voice of Europe would weaken, it could never make itself heard in the world."
But in London, which faces a general election next Thursday, the fellow Europeans are conspicuous by their absence. But there are foreigners aplenty in London, and all deeply involved in the campaign. The point is that they are all Americans. From former President Bill Clinton endorsing Prime Minister Tony Blair by live video to Clinton's old pollster, Stan Greenberg, advising the Blair campaign, to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., to go campaigning with his old friend Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, the streets of London resound to accents of American political operatives.
At least, there are lot of Americans to be found at the headquarters of Blair's Labor Party, which with its obsession with focus groups and tracking polls and fundraising has the feel of the Democratic Party's trans-Atlantic branch. But there are no American Republicans at the Conservative Party headquarters of the Tory leader Michael Howard, who is not well-regarded at President George W. Bush's White House.
Howard was told last year by Bush's top political aide Karl Rove to forget about any courtesy calls at the White House if he was going to attack Blair over the Anglo-American war in Iraq. This is complex. Howard supported the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but knows that the war is so unpopular in Britain that it represents the widest chink in Blair's armor. Howard has therefore attacked Blair on the issue of trust, saying he took the country to war on false pretenses, exaggerating the intelligence about Iraq's nebulous weapons of mass destruction. But this is an attack that also causes collateral damage to the White House, so there is a family quarrel under way between the Republican and Conservative parties and as a result, Bush's White House is quietly backing Blair, their most reliable ally on the world stage.
And thus the foreign accents to be heard in the Conservative campaign are Australian, led by Linton Crosby, the adviser to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who dreamed up the idea of "dog-whistle campaigning." Just as humans cannot hear the ultra-high pitch of a dog whistle, Crosby had dreamed up campaigns that resonate only with a specific target audience, and not with the whole electorate. So the new Conservative slogan "Are you think what we're thinking?" is meant to appeal to those voters worried about immigration, without opening the Tories to a charge of racism. Equally, Howard's brief suggestion that abortions were too easily obtained was meant to appeal to social conservatives without offending too many women voters.
Be the advisers American or Australian, this British general election is taking place within the Anglosphere, which is more than just the English-speaking world. It is a place where election campaigns are very similar, where voters respond to similar signals and similar appeals, where the emotional and subliminal languages are almost interchangeable. Countries in the Anglosphere have similar concepts of law, of trial by jury and private property and share some preconceptions about a citizen's home being his castle and keeping the state in its place. They also share robust attitudes toward the use of military force in the modern world. The Brits, Yanks and Aussies of the Anglosphere were also the only countries whose troops attacked Iraq from day one of the war.
By contrast, the French election is taking place in the Eurosphere. Schroeder's Germans are urging the French to vote "Yes," and so is Italy's former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who served as the last president of the EU Commission in Brussels. A French "No" vote, Prodi said, would mean "the fall of Europe." The Netherlands' former deputy premier Annemarie Jorristma says it is a question of whether "France will do honor or horror to the cause of Europe" and Spain's prime minister, Jose Luis Zapatero, suggests "a Europe without France in the front rank is unimaginable."
Chirac, Schroeder, Zapatero and Prodi all, of course, opposed the Iraq war, and all have visibly expressed their discomfort at living in a world dominated by the single American superpower. Similarly, they all want "Europe" to provide a bit of balance and to give them a little room to maneuver, for example, to sell arms to China if they wish, even if the Americans warn them against the idea.
But these European leaders, by definition, are members of the European elite that has consistently promoted and supported the project of European unity and of the new EU constitution. And the real question looming over the French referendum is whether the French voters themselves still feel as pro-European as their leaders, or whether their resentment of their own governing elite in Paris is going to spill over into a rejection of the EU elites in Brussels. The current opinion polls suggest they might do just that, which is why the Eurosphere leaders are all campaigning so hard in France.
