Mass-hysteria time: following Black Tuesday--Nov. 2--Europe goes nuts.

PRESIDENT BUSH's reelection has released a burst of mass hysteria in much of the world. It's a fascinating phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of people are convinced of the wickedness and stupidity of Americans and their president. The mood must have been similar when Peter the Hermit was whipping up the Popular Crusade in the Dark Ages, and later when the Albigensian heretics, or the Levellers of the English civil war, were drumming the idea of apocalypse into the heads of audiences eager to believe it.

The thrill of apocalypse this time begins in America, when writers of the status of Garry Wills tell the world that Americans have gone back on the liberal values of 18th-century Enlightenment; or when Democrats fill the correspondence columns of the European press with letters about Republican horrors. The globalized media scoop up these symptoms instantly, magnify them, and presto--mass hysteria infects people in the manner of an epidemic.

See how easily it's done. A cinema wardrobe assistant by the name of Caroline Gandon is sitting in a Paris cafe when up comes a correspondent from the Daily Telegraph. She tells him, "I thought the Americans were going to show the world that they are not completely brainwashed. I was wrong. We're stuck yet again with a dangerous fanatic," and a million or two readers nod. On Britain's Channel 4, Peter Oborne, political editor of the nominally conservative Spectator, condemns American voters as "ignorant beyond belief," concluding, "We should be very afraid."

Anatole Kaletsky, usually a sober commentator in Rupert Murdoch's Times, declares himself "disappointed, and even horrified" by Bush's reelection. The consolation, however, is that Bush is likely to endure a military or economic crisis that will destroy the Republican party for good. The Daily Mirror, a tabloid with a huge circulation, shrieks on its front page: "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" On one television show, a man in the audience likens Bush to Hitler, and on another, some minor celebrity is solidly applauded for sneering that Americans have chosen "a psychopathic idiot to rule the world."

Le Monde is a grey Parisian lady that makes the New York Times seem a Technicolor glory. On November 3 its star Daniel Vernet published an article on the front page with the title, "The Europeans Find Themselves Facing a New Challenge." To a man, he asserted confidently, Europeans would have voted for Kerry, and their disappointment is specially acute because "detestation of the president" prevailed in governments and public opinion everywhere.

The secret dread of all concerned is that the Americans have no choice except to fight the War on Terror, and this is bound soon to involve them too. It's getting closer. One day there are almost 200 dead in terror attacks in Madrid, and another day in Holland--the epitome of anythinggoes tolerance--a filmmaker who dared to criticize Muslim treatment of women is killed and almost decapitated in the street.

Europeans do not really believe that they should--or will--ever have to go to war again, and their governments accordingly have scaled down their militaries to levels more appropriate for police work. Continental Europe might very well succumb to an invasion by a really large army, say from Algeria or Turkey or specially a nuclear-armed Iran. Had 9/11 been directed against a target anywhere in Europe, the victim country would never have been able to take any sort of military measures to destroy the Taliban. This impotence conditions the whole culture to defeatism and appeasement, and makes America seem frightening in its insistence on standing up for itself. The Swedish prime minister, Goeran Persson, reflected this culture when he said, "Europe will continue to criticize Bush the same way as earlier," but in view of the president's new mandate, "I do not believe that he will be more willing to listen."

In France, the bacillus of mass hysteria is carefully cultivated at the top. Jacques Chirac attacked Bush's victory so swiftly and directly that it amounted to a declaration of political and cultural war. He said, "It is evident that Europe, now more than ever, must strengthen its unity and dynamism when faced with this great world power. More than ever, we must reinforce Europe politically and economically." In reality, neither unity nor dynamism is to be found anywhere on the continent. Instability in Iraq instead offers France a chance to increase its own influence and to harm the United States. Along-term policy is coming to a head. When the Soviet Union began to fail 20 years ago, France saw an opportunity to replace it in the Middle East. Supposedly the Europeans and the Arabs were to come together in a bloc, a superpower to counter the United States. As a means to this end, Chirac was always glad to give unconditional support to Saddam Hussein.

Only hours after Bush's victory, Chirac was due to meet Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi over a working lunch in the EU capital of Brussels. Suddenly he discovered that he had to attend the funeral of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, these past 40 years the absolute ruler of Abu Dhabi, a Gulf emirate where Beau Geste and the French Foreign Legion never penetrated. Allawi was being deliberately snubbed as the wrong kind of Arab in Chirac's eyes.

In a fine example of double standards, Chirac is quite prepared to use force when he judges it in the national interest--as now in the Ivory Coast--but he and his government are making it clear that they condemn Americans using force in their national interest in Fallujah or anywhere else. Evidently they are encouraging the Sunnis of Iraq at the very least not to participate in next January's election and so ensure failure to normalize the country.

The French have similarly done their best to inherit Arafat and the PLO from the defunct Soviet Union. Time and again, Arafat has been an honored guest at the Elysee, and time and again France has rescued him from the consequences of his grievous and bloody misjudgments, including the enthusiasm for Saddam that he shared with the French. Thanks to France, the EU taxpayer has liberally financed the Palestinian Authority, in the process slipping untold millions of dollars into Arafat's unaudited and invisible accounts. The moment local doctors announced that Arafat was suffering from some illness they couldn't diagnose, Chirac stepped in. He sent a military plane to fetch Arafat, he arranged for him to be treated in the French military hospital on the outskirts of Paris, and at the head of a motorcade he made a much-publicized bedside visit.

The clamor instantly arises from all sides for a renewed "peace process." Muslims are said to be so distraught by the issue of Palestine that everywhere they turn into terrorists. But when "peace process" was put into practice with the Oslo Accords, it turned out to be a euphemism for appeasement of Palestinian terror, and it therefore failed disastrously.

A village despot by the standards of Saddam Hussein, Arafat nonetheless has prudently made sure to have no obvious successor. Civil war, anarchy, and a seizure of power by Islamists such as Hamas are very real dangers for the Palestinians. They are going to have to undertake some profound soul-searching in order to overcome Arafat's legacy of hatred and violence. To clamor now for a repeat of the experience of "peace process" is bad diplomacy, weakening President Bush's ability to spend some of his acclaimed new political capital on the Palestinian state he rightly wants to see established in the end. And more than that, "peace process" at all costs is evidence of the belief that terrorists don't have to be fought but can be brought round by nice words.

One other thing hangs over the president's second term, and that's the fate of the remaining countries of the Axis of Evil. This is discussed only in the corridors of power and other dark places, and nobody seems to have ideas about what's to be done, if anything. The Europeans naturally advocate appeasement. A military solution may be impossible politically or logistically, in which case the world looks likely to have to live once more with Mutual Assured Destruction, this time in the hands of a Korean Stalinist and half a dozen Iranian ayatollahs. Whatever happens, another bout of mass hysteria about George W. Bush is surely in the offing.