TWITCHY EUROPE

For several years we've had left-wing regimes with right-wing credentials. Now we have mavericks looking across the spectrum for support. In France M Le Pen did not really collect. He picked up enough left wing votes to top up his natural support and push his candidacy into the second round of the Presidential election, but he then failed to make any progress. Le Pen did make some appeal across the spectrum, but he is the sort of anti-immigration figure that liberals need. They can vote against him not just with a clear conscience but with pleasure and so suppress their doubts about immigration. Many of his voters were extremely reluctant to confess what they had done in the polling booth, and what they feared was the burden of shame imposed on those who object to others because of skin color. This burden is expressed as argument in the strained but effective claim that there really could be no other motive. Though Le Pen can say what others dare not say, he also drags down the cause which he props up. Recent opinion polls make it clear that both stubborn opposition to immigration and popular contempt for the political system were much more widespread in France than support for than Le Pen himself.

But Le Pen seemed to pull an even odder character into the headlines. Fortuyn was a left-wing maverick--post-Left, as in post-modern, might be truer--bidding for votes across the spectrum. His success, although a local success in the Netherlands, had just broken the indifference barrier and become headline European news a week or so before his assassination and the registration of his success in the Dutch national elections which followed his death. Fortuyn invented his own party. He was potentially a much more formidable political model than Le Pen. Le Pen was feared and detested by immigrants: Fortuyn could appeal to immigrants who agreed with him that Holland should take no more of them.

If I were employed to paint helicopters black on behalf of the Trilateral Commission, my advice would have been that the assassination of Fortuyn made sense. Fortuyn's death was not, we must suppose, the work of a globalist authority content to meet Le Pen head to head but alarmed by a new trend in the Netherlands, the heartland of modern moderation. (And if you do not suppose so, you really did not read it here first!) But the times are strained and abnormal things are likely to happen even here in Western Europe. In England the Islamophobic British National Party won three seats in local elections in Burnley, a decayed former mill town in Lancashire. The BNP-types are cleverer than the right-wing extremists of the past. Today they concentrate their attack on Islam rather than on black faces and have just proven that they can fight an election campaign. So, once again, the case for being vigilant about Islam is made incorrect by its worst, noisiest supporters.

The two main British parties are now on guard against Islamophobia. I would hardly bother to mention Burnley, if it did not appear to fit into a European trend. That the citizens of Hamburg feel the same way as the electors in East Lancashire has been clear for some time. What has surprised everyone is that the Germany's FDP--the Free Democrats--a drab center party that the German electoral system keeps live despite the best intentions of the voters--have suddenly discovered as Volk and the deputy leader has made non-hostile, amost favourable comments about the French support for Le Pen and the Austrian support for Haider. There is a trend out there.

Rebellions against the political establishments are no easier in Europe than they are in America. But the establishments are uneasy. The European project is going through another wobbly phase. If the Irish reject the Nice Treaty a second time, the entire treaty will have to be dropped or applied by fraud. The Germans still regret the passing of their currency. The Poles are being forced to humiliate themselves and take a vow of poverty as the price of being allowed into the EU. The former Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, used to call Polish membership of the EU an existential requirement, which sounded more digestive than philosophical.

Today, it is quite possible that Germany would be highly relieved if the Poles decided, after all, that they were not ready for the EU. But it is more likely that Berlin knows that Warsaw will simply ignore the fine print, seize membership as an act of faith, and then demand better treatment once membership is theirs. What Berlin may hope is that by being inflexible with the Poles they somehow prevent the same approach being taken by other applicant states. The Poles must suffer to keep out the others. The point is not that Germany is weak, it is that reality is catching up with conventional ambitions and cheap rhetoric and payment time is unpleasant. As in France and Britain, Germans can sense that their politicians are third-rate, monotonous and far less useful than they should be. The war against terrorism grips few imaginations. The sense of the enemy is out there has faded rapidly.

What happened to the World Trade Center provided a political opportunity that has now evaporated. 9/ll is now taken to have been just a very bad case of terrorism. And the right response? If America had found a country to blame, Europe might have sustained an interest, but there is now a mulish refusal to accept an American lead and cynicism about her motives. Prime Minister Blair is now rather isolated on this.

The mood--in London as much as Berlin--is not exactly anti-American but it is distinctly Washington-averse. The Bush administration seems to have had no plan but to get the NATO allies involved in a war which is not 9/11 related. The British press is believes that nothing is happening in Afghanistan because there are enough British troops out there who say so. Why should the British, French and German forces march on Baghdad? Is it because something must be seen to be done somewhere, because Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan and the US dare not complain?

A common view is the America should fight her own battles without demanding a protective escort of allies after sign of difficulty. The suspicion--confirmed by the Royal Marines in Afghanistan--is that there is no war to fight. The genuinely pro-American feeling which followed 9/11 has receded swiftly and has been replaced by puzzlement about Washington‰s leadership. A trade war against America, or a major transatlantic dispute about Israel or the environment or the ICC, seems almost as likely as joint military action against a rogue state. Popular sympathy for New Yorkers will remain vivid for years, but it may count for as little in securing international support for Washington as the memory of IRA bombs in London secures support for British policies in Ulster.

Michael Stenton, a Cambridge historian, is a member of TRI's Center for International Affairs' Board of Advisors and Director of Studies of The Lord Byron Foundation.