ONDON - Europeans are paying more attention than usual to Tuesday's US election because they believe Al Gore and George W. Bush embrace distinctly different views of the world, and especially of Europe.
While it is difficult to generalize about a large region with disparate national priorities and idiosyncrasies, analysts, diplomats, and some politicians suggested in interviews that most Europeans see Gore as a predictable extension of the Clinton administration, while Bush is viewed as a wild card with isolationist tendencies - or at least a tendency to focus less on Europe and more on Asia and the Middle East.
Two weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's chief foreign policy adviser, set off alarm bells across Europe when she said Bush would pull US troops out of the Balkans. Last week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary general, George Robertson, tried to calm the European allies, saying he had been assured by Bush advisers that would not happen.
Still, as they seek to create their own rapid reaction force to enable them to act independently of NATO in some cases, the European allies are unsure which candidate would be more encouraging and helpful.
There is increasing concern about American unilateralism, the tendency of the United States to act without consulting its European allies, or with just token consultation.
James Lyons, director of the Bosnia project for the International Crisis Group, an international policy advocacy group, said many in Europe worry that a Bush presidency would be a return to the ''we don't have a dog in this fight'' attitude toward the Balkans embodied by James Baker, the secretary of state under Bush's father.
''If Bush wins and does what Rice said he'd do in the Balkans, you can kiss NATO goodbye,'' said Lyons, speaking from Brussels, where he says the joke is NATO stands for ''Needs Americans To Operate.''
Stability in the Balkans is crucial to Europe, which has been forced to absorb millions of refugees as the former Yugoslavia broke up in the face of four wars over the last decade.
Russia's stability is also crucial, which is why Europeans are also anxious about American plans to build a National Missile Defense. Nearly all European governments, and many Europeans, are vehemently against the plan, saying it violates nonproliferation treaties and will reignite the arms race.
Celeste Wallander, a senior fellow in European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said the Russians are hoping the Europeans can prevail on the Americans to ditch the missile plan, ''but the Russians know that when push comes to shove, Europeans stand by the US and NATO.''
But Catherine Kelleher, director of the Aspen Institute, a Berlin-based think tank, said that while most discussions of European concerns about Bush and Gore tend to focus on the Balkans and National Missile Defense, trade is a more pressing issue. The Americans accuse the Europeans of protectionism, and the European refusal to accept products such as hormone-treated US beef and genetically modified food has touched off retaliatory trade wars.
''Trade disputes are increasingly dividing the United States and the European Union,'' said Kelleher. ''Europeans seem to think that they would do better under Bush, but the Republicans are philosophically more in favor of free trade than the Democrats.''
Outside of Britain - where the Labor government does little to conceal its preference for Gore and the opposition Conservatives believe a Republican win would help them in next May's British election - European governments consider it bad manners to openly back a US candidate, not to mention bad politics if they back the wrong one.
Still, all but a few of the 15 European Union member nations are led by center-left parties or coalitions, meaning that most European governments are politically more sympathetic to Gore. As Lamberto Dini, the Italian foreign minister put it recently, the Europeans usually describe this bias as a case of favoring the status quo, not partisanship.
Some in the Irish government worry that a Bush victory would lead to a gradual disengagement from the peace process in Northern Ireland. Clinton broke with the longstanding precedent of treating Northern Ireland as an internal British matter and injected himself and his administration into resolving the conflict, and he generally earned high marks for doing so. But Ireland is the type of situation that Bush advisers see as outside the natural realm of American influence and interests.
Germans are torn over the race. Although George W. Bush has never been to Germany, his father is warmly regarded there, especially by Berliners, for having presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, said Kelleher.
While some Europeans have voiced concern that a Bush victory would give more power to US Senator Jesse Helms, the Republican from North Carolina who heads the powerful Foreign Relations Committee and wants to see less US intervention abroad, Michaela Honicke, an analyst with the German Society for Foreign Affairs, sees a more benign scenario.
''I think if Bush wins, he will have a soothing effect and work more smoothly with Congress,'' she said, adding that no American president can afford to be an isolationist.
Most Europeans, meanwhile, seem to believe that whoever wins will fashion a foreign policy that has little to do with the rhetoric of the campaign and more to do with American self-interest. John Gray, a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, said America ''is tilting toward unilateral action in defense of its national interest.'' While Bush may ''accentuate'' unilateralism, he said, there is little difference between the two candidates.
As Gray put it, the future of American foreign policy is likely to be shaped by what dictated its past: oil, trade, and geopolitics.
