WorldView:In a revealing survey of public opinion in 12 European countries this summer, a pervasive gulf was found between the views of the general public and of EU elites on the desirability of strong United States leadership in world affairs and the likelihood that relations between the EU and the US will improve after the presidential elections next year.
Compared to the elites, the general public are much less enthusiastic about US leadership, more likely to think transatlantic relations have worsened and are unlikely to improve, less likely to value Nato, and more likely to say the EU should go it alone in dealing with international threats.
Both groups are deeply suspicious of the Bush administration and critical of the war in Iraq.
Other findings are that while there is widespread support for deploying peacekeeping forces in conflict areas, less than one-third favour combat troops - especially in Afghanistan or Iran. In sharp contrast, most Americans support using force in both places if necessary.
The research was conducted by the German Marshall Fund in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey and the UK - and in the US. An accompanying survey of opinion among members of the European Parliament, the European Commission and officials in the EU Council of Ministers by Italian researchers asked the same questions.
The researchers ask whether the public will eventually catch up with the elites, or will the elites shift course towards the voters? There could be a combination of the two or the gap might persist.
In the US, similar variations of attitude have been found. A recent synopsis of US polls found that, unlike their elites, most Americans favour strong international engagement, multilateralism and international institutions, reject hegemonic rule and believe negative views of the US derive primarily from current US policies, not American values.
There are, of course, also political differences within elites and mass opinions in each bloc, although they are not as pronounced as the inter-bloc ones.
Those who study foreign policy are divided on how public opinion affects the traditionally more restricted and secretive foreign policy field, controlled by political, media and diplomatic elites with little accountability to ordinary people's views. There are, after all, huge gaps in knowledge, interest and attention between the general public and these elites.
Normally the public allows elites conduct foreign policy within established policy and ideological frameworks. It is all too easy for realists to conclude that public opinion can effectively be disregarded as peripheral, since public attention is so spasmodic and attenuated. In that case, it doesn't greatly matter that attitudinal gaps like these in contemporary Europe develop and persevere, since the elites will run the show anyway and will be able to persuade mass publics to accept their policies when needed.
An alternative view argues that such complacency among policy-makers or researchers is misplaced.
Historical, political and polling evidence shows public opinion on these issues responds rationally, if at a distance and sometimes at a slower pace. It is prudent as well as democratically desirable for policy-making elites to know this.
Besides, circumstances may change so that the normal becomes abnormal; and when that happens elites can be left stranded - sometimes dramatically so, when they refuse to believe opinion has shifted and will no longer accept the old policies and ways of making them.
The major question posed for transatlantic relations is whether this growing rift between Europe and the US represents the eventual end of the West as we have known it during the cold war. Or is the rift Bush- and Iraq-specific? If so, after the US presidential elections the relationship can be repaired, reformulated and relaunched, since it is based on a continuing political, economic and ethical security community. Is the relationship dispensable or indispensable, inevitable or contingent on circumstances that have now changed utterly?
There are no readymade answers to these questions. Conventional approaches tend to be conservative precisely because they assume continuity despite the accumulation of evidence that things are changing. They share an addiction to stability married to a fear of disorder, as Keynes remarked of the Versailles agreement in 1919.
At certain critical moments the status quo may no longer be sustainable. Making these points, Michael Cox, an international relations scholar who pays close attention to the changing transatlantic relationship, believes we may now have reached such a tipping point. He compares the failure to take such a possibility seriously to the Kremlinologists' lamentable record in predicting 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union.
It is worth recalling the remark made by Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, to a group of visiting Americans to Moscow in 1989: "We are going to do a terrible thing to you - we are going to deprive you of an enemy." It has taken nearly two decades for the logic of his insight to work itself out in transatlantic relations.
The processes of change are by no means limited to the Bush presidency or the post 9/11 years. They began in the 1990s with the profound reorganisation and gradual enlargement of the EU and the emergence of US military unipolardom in those years - associated with growing disregard of its allies' interests, as most Europeans believe.
Robert Kagan's well-known essay on the growing gulf between them, in which he depicted Europe as a (weak) Venus devoted to soft postmodern power, while the US remained a modernist giant policing a disorderly world, was published in 2002, after all, and was intended to sum up more than a decade of change.
But the damage may already have been done. While the US is consumed by Iraq, Europe debates pulling troops out of the Nato operation in Afghanistan. That would end the attempt to extend the alliance worldwide under continuing US control.
Nor is there any prospect of harnessing Nato to an attack on Iran - Sarkozy notwithstanding. Terrorism is not as unifying an enemy as communism was.
These are indeed critical moments, as US elites look ahead to more ad hoc operations and gradually lose interest in Europe.