Shotgun Franchise

The American presidential election, due to be held in two days, is like no other election ever held. Eighteen months ago, on a cold February morning, an estimated 30 million people joined hands in 60 countries to protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. It was the first truly global protest that transcended national boundaries and was contemptuously ignored by the governments of the US and the UK on the grounds that they and they alone were the custodians of 'national security'. A similar groundswell is driving unprecedented international support for challenger John Kerry today. Surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that across Europe, between 60 and 80 per cent of the respondents want Kerry to win. Many wish they had a vote in the US election because its outcome is going to affect their lives. This is the second indication in two years of the way globalisation is knitting the world together not only in the realm of economics, but of politics as well.

The support for Kerry is being driven by fear. The full, threatening implications of America's new National Security Doctrine, unveiled by Bush in 2002, have at last sunk in and with it, the main pillar upon which peace and security in the world order rested has been shattered. For more than three centuries, peace had been maintained by the doctrine of deterrence. It permitted a country to declare war on another only if the latter first took action that threatened its territory or some vital interest. This gave the people of small countries abutting powerful neighbours immense psychological security because it meant that the power to decide to go to war or maintain peace rested with them, not with their powerful neighbour. All they had to do to remain secure was not to take any aggressive action against the neighbour.

The doctrine of deterrence itself was based upon an even older and more powerful idea—that of a just war. In Europe, this was based upon the writings of Christian theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who had declared that war was justified only when it was a response to harm done. It was enshrined in international law by Hugo Grotius in 1620. Together, the belief in national sovereignty, deterrence and war as a last resort gave Europe a 100 years of peace between 1815 and 1914 and the western world another 50 years between 1945 and the end of the Cold War. This is the doctrine that Bush swept away in June 2002. The new national security doctrine replaced deterrence with not even preemption but prevention. Bush explicitly claimed to fight 'terror' (an abstract noun), America had the 'right' not just to preempt an imminent attack from a particular country, but to prevent any country from developing the capacity to threaten the US at any time in the future. To make matters worse, by invading first Afghanistan and then, less excusably, Iraq, the US showed that it, and it alone, would determine which country became eligible for preventive attack, and when. Since the Iraq war, it has threatened Syria, then Iran and more mutedly North Korea. In all probability, it also threatened preventive attack on Libya. No one knows on whom it will train its sights next.

European countries are especially perturbed because more and more people no longer feel that they are exempt from the baleful scrutiny of the US. Most of them have sizable Muslim immigrant populations. All of them have seen terrorist cells sprout among these communities. All of them fear that US unilateralism is feeding instead of crushing terrorism. And nearly all have suffered from terrorist attacks after Iraq's invasion, either there or at home.

Fear is also the key to understanding the unprecedented interest Americans are taking in their election. The Republicans are aware that in terms of achievement, the Bush presidency has been, to quote Al Gore, a "catastrophic" failure. The labour force has shrunk by one million, against an increase of 21 million during Clinton's presidency; 13 per cent of the people are now living below the poverty line against 11 per cent four years ago; the number of Americans without health insurance has risen by almost six million; tax breaks for the very rich and for corporations have combined with sharply increased military spending to push the budget deficit into the stratosphere and sap confidence in the dollar. Republicans have therefore been driven back upon their weapon of last resort. This is to terrify the voters into bringing back a "strong war president". Thus, they have left no stone unturned to heighten the threat from terrorism, to depict Kerry as a weak man incapable of taking a strong stand against terrorism, and therefore certain to invite attacks by Al Qaeda if elected. These tactics are working. A large proportion of the American population is now impervious to reason. It doesn't mind that it's been lied to and that in the name of security, safeguards for individual freedom enshrined in its Constitution are being whittled away. All it wants is to feel secure.

Lastly, fear of a different kind is also the driving force behind the Democratic campaign. No one in the party has forgotten that although Al Gore polled half a million votes more than Bush in 2000, a Republican administration in Florida and a Republican majority in the Supreme Court stole the election from him. And no one in the party is unaware of how that has changed history. The Democrats are determined not to let it happen again and have deployed thousands of lawyers and human right activists in virtually every constituency in the dozen or more 'battleground' states that will decide the outcome. All things considered, there has seldom been a more dismal, fear-laden and yet portentous election in human history.