Where are Europe's visionary political ideas?

Jonathan Fenby, Observer News Service, London

In the coming six months, the people of Western Europe's two biggest countries will be bombarded by rhetoric as politicians vie for their votes in national elections. They will be promised sunny horizons and warned of impending doom if they vote the wrong way.

More than five decades after the end of its last great conflict and 12 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe is in pretty good shape. Yes, unemployment is unacceptably high in some countries, pockets of poverty and social tension persist and the shine has gone off the economic expansion that heralded the new century. But,on any broad view, most of the continent's citizens enjoy comfortable lives.

This has come with a price. The dearth of new ideas, of major cultural innovation, of serious debate about the future has become a hallmark of the way we live now. All the innovation in the world may go into developing mobile telephone facilities or selling deodorants; but where is the equivalent of the flood of thinking about society, politics and the economy that characterized the continent in the last century?

Which European authors or thinkers set the world alight as they once did? The French film Amelie was highly enjoyable and may win an Oscar but is this the best that the cinema of Renoir and the nouvelle vague can produce -- and what happened to German and Italian films? Art has become self-referentially repetitive. Post-modern irony excuses anything. And who built the Louvre pyramid in Paris and the museum in Bilboa? A Chinese-American and an American.

Perhaps the cosy snooze Europe is having under its comfort blanket is the inevitable result of a society where, for most people, most things work, the sad state of Britain's transport and public services being the exception. Even as massive a change as the introduction of euro notes and coins went with hardly a hitch, and is now taken for granted.

All we ask of politicians is that they are efficient managers. Forget about the vision thing. Put the next great development, the future shape of the European Union after enlargement to the East, into the safe hands of a 75-year-old former French president and hold your breath for protracted wrangles about qualified majority voting and farm subsidies.

Or take the election campaigns in Germany and France. Both contests have a deadening air of deja vu about them. The contenders have been around for decades. The themes are as old as the hills.

Germany is at a crucial stage of evolution from post-war guilt into the major continental player, but the September showdown between Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and the right-wing Bavarian premier, Edmund Stoiber, will be all about the former's responsibility for the economic downturn and the latter's promises to produce a recovery.

In France, where there will be a two-round presidential election in April-May followed by a parliamentary poll in June, voters have a choice between a 69-year-old, neo-Gaullist who has been in public office almost continuously for 35 years, and a 64- year-old veteran of the Left. President Jacques Chirac is putting his faith in a highly unoriginal platform of tax cuts and law and order; in a bid to appeal to the center, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin says that, while he is a Socialist, his program is not -- a fair reflection of the state of the ideological debate.

French voters are expected to show their contempt by continuing the upwards graph line of abstentions. The polls show two-thirds of the electorate expressing no interest in the outcome, and three- quarters saying they see no difference between Chirac and Jospin.

The decline during Chirac's seven years in office of what was once Europe's most powerful elected post is no Gallic aberration. Silvio Berlusconi's dodging and weaving hardly inspires respect for the Italian premiership. Tony Blair's problems with credibility have become a given of British politics. His good friend, Jose Maria Aznar, the Prime Minister of Spain, may speak well on issues such as economic liberalization, but has a decidedly spotty reputation at home.

Where new politics does emerge, it is all too often as a rancid smell. As seen in Holland and Austria, emerging parties base their appeal on anti-immigrant rhetoric. The French search for a 'third man' to break the Gaullist-Socialist logjam has come up with Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front and the former minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who peddles a left-wing brand of nationalism that sounded out of date when he first joined the government in 1981.

The picture repeats itself when one looks further afield. After much delay, Europeans got themselves together and took action in Bosnia and Kosovo. They have a scattering of troops in Afghanistan. They have defended the Kyoto protocol and made proposals on debt relief.

But initiatives elsewhere, such as in the Middle East, ran into the sand, and officials in Washington have made it clear that President Bush is going to do what he wants in his war on terrorism regardless of criticism from Chris Patten or the French foreign minister.

As Blair has shown clearly in lining up behind Washington, EU leaders still insist on conducting their own national foreign policy and are not going to give that up in search of joint policies that could propose fresh solutions with the weight of the whole community behind them.

It is common currency to call the last 100 years the American century. That is partially true -- but only if you start in the 1940s. It was in Europe that the great battles were fought intellectually and with blood -- above all, between democracy and authoritarianism, be it of the fascist or communist variety.

After the two hot wars, the continent sensibly decided that it had had enough and set about constructing a peaceful union. After the end of the cold conflict, the logical step is to extend that to the former Soviet bloc.

In that, it may have been too successful for its own good. In the process, it has lost its edge. The old mantras are not enough. Politicians live in a world of their own. The people have lost the belief that things can be changed for the better, that innovation means more than digital television.

The danger is that, if prosperity ebbs away, we lack the social and cultural resilience to meet the challenge in the way the democracies did in the last century. That is the kind of issue the EU leaders should have been talking about in Barcelona this weekend, rather than electricity liberalization.