Peter Jay is a former British Ambassador to the United States. He is also a Contributing Editor of IntellectualCapital.com. His email address is peterjay@intellectualcapital.com.

Nov. 3, 1998 -- You in the States are at the polls as this is written. So, I will abstain from pontificating on your political trends, thereby denying my critics the pleasure of proving me wrong by the time this is read.

Let us look instead at the electoral trends on this side of the ocean and examine whether the general theme of these columns -- the regrettable drifting apart of Europe and America -- is reinforced by the decisions European voters have recently been making.

The changing winds of European politics

Europe's political switch from the right to the left

Traditionally, in the post-war period, the United States has been highly sensitive to political trends in Western Europe, worrying from about 1947 onward that communists, socialists and other supposedly unreliable friends of freedom might take part of Europe into the Soviet orbit or into a dangerous condition of "Finlandization." NATO and various less overt manifestations of American concern were deployed to keep Western Europe safe from such menaces.

By the 1980s it seemed that such battles were definitively won. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl heavily outnumbered Francois Mitterrand in France, who rapidly opted for an easy life by effectively joining the club and embracing conservative policies. By the end of the '80s the Berlin Wall was down and the Soviet Empire dissolving.

But now on the eve of the millennium Britain, France, Germany and Italy have within 18 months replaced governments of the nominal right with governments of the nominal left. And the old guard seems to be inching its way back into control in Moscow. Among the major countries in Europe, only Spain has swung the other way.

Should Europe's movements ring alarms in the United States for those who still fear collectivist political ideas as a threats to the freedom and individualism that America especially cherishes?The answer is "almost certainly not," so far as anything except the possible events in Russia is concerned. European politics have become much more like American politics used to be, with electoral battles being fought for power between rival political teams for whom policies and ideology are only incidental weapons in the battle.

In Europe today the key political leaders on the left are overwhelmingly preoccupied with winning the electoral battle and with the importance -- to that end -- of reassuring the voters that they will allow nothing to prejudice their treasured prosperity.Americans might also consider that, since the Soviet threat has evaporated, it should no longer be of much concern to Americans whether Europeans dabble with collectivist ideas in their domestic political life. Likewise, Europeans should not butt into Americans' own very special debates on both the fundamentalist and the intellectual right.

What does the euro mean?

Nonetheless, Americans should not be complacent. Forces are at work that, though not in any meaningful sense left-wing, are hostile to American interests, and indeed are only thinly veiled anti-Americanism. They may be summed up in the phrase "Euro-nationalism," i.e. the wish to assert the profile, influence and eventually power of a political entity called "Europe" in global and regional affairs as a goal in its own right and for its own sake.

The humiliating farces to which this urge has periodically led in no way discourages its conductors, who see in failure only new arguments for trying harder. The new European currency, the euro, which starts life in two months in 11 member countries of the European Union is not happening because anyone has suddenly decided that the E.U. is an optimal currency area.

The new currency is happening because it is backed by politicians who see it as a vehicle for promoting a political goal, the unity and visibility of Europe (with a capital "E"), and for confronting the real insult to European amour propre, namely the dollar. The economics of all this are dubious and little considered.

The strength and role of the dollar in the post-war world has almost certainly been a burden on the real U.S. economy, handicapping its indigenous industry and labor force, while at the same time being a boon to the European and Japanese economies -- especially during the first three decades of reconstruction and rapid export-led growth after World War II.

But European politicians understand little of this and see only a symbol which, especially in France, provokes only jealousy and resentment. Sophisticated Americans might, of course, argue that they have no reasons to object if Europeans wish for reasons of naive prestige to saddle themselves with an economic burden.-- one that might partly displace the dollar as the only globally used currency and thus relieve pressures on producers in the United States. And, if that was the whole of the story, they would be right.

But Americans need to further consider whether Euro-nationalism, which is in no way diminished by the arrival of nominally left governments in Europe (indeed, it is augmented in some countries like Britain, despite the prime minister's strong personal links to Washington), will stop there.

Competing forces

It is much more probable that when Brussels and Paris discover that making the euro a global currency will raise its exchange rate against other global currencies too high for the comfort of European producers, they will not confess their error. Instead, they will argue for the various protectionist and crypto-protectionist devices they are always longing to impose both in order to gratify their constituencies and to flex their governmental muscles.

This will create a real long-term threat to both global and American economic interests. An autarchic Europe, with or without dreams of specifically politico-military visibility, will be a menace to the United States, as well as to itself and its neighbors. While that certainly is not the goal of leaders like British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, Americans will be wise to wonder whether the enlightenment of such individuals will be enough to withstand the tide of Euro-self-aggrandizement, which is currently flowing as strongly on the left as on the right of European politics.