Donald Rumsfeld's infamous distinction between "old" and "new" Europe seems unlikely to live on. But there is a fault line running through Europe right now - one of outlook rather than age - which the recent political earthquake in the US will probably widen unless European policymakers begin paying more attention to it. It is the division between those focused on domestic agendas and internal issues, and those who want Europe to pull its weight in the world.

Europe's introspection goes back a long way - long before last year's voters administered such a drubbing to the misnamed constitution. As historians of 19th-century empire tell us, most Europeans were far less bothered by the world than the world was by them, even in the heyday of imperialism. In the early 1940s, Hitler's "Fortress Europe" was nothing if not a formula for Continental self-sufficiency and so, less crudely, was its more durable successor. The European Economic Community showed its members that they could survive, indeed do better than before, by giving up their overseas colonies and dealing with one another instead. The pell-mell expansion of the past decade, by presenting the European Community/Union with an unprecedented institutional challenge, has intensified this inward-looking mentality and vastly complicated foreign policymaking. The Cyprus question now blights Turkey's accession talks, while the proposed EU partnership with Russia is held hostage by the troubled Polish government. To judge from the Dutch polls and the pre-election struggle under way in France, many Europeans now see globalisation as a threat, despair of ever being able to influence Washington in a more positive direction and want simply to pull up the drawbridge.