The West, Blinkered, Keeps Blundering : Islamic world: Its evolution has every chance of being democratic if democracies will put ideals ahead of deal-making.

Pardon my French, but the government of France barely gives a damn about Rwanda. France cares first and foremost about Algeria, a volcano about to erupt.

Algeria, once the jewel of the French empire, was the scene in the 1950s of a vicious war of independence that spilled over into France, nearly bringing about a right-wing dictatorship. Today it is the cradle of a North African fundamentalist revival that is overflowing into French domestic politics with consequences that could again polarize France. Prime Minister Edouard Balladur calls it France’s “greatest threat.” In America, influential intellectuals beat the same drum.

If there is a crisis--and this is by no means certain--the West has made its own sizable contribution. For decades, the Western powers have rallied behind oil-rich governments in the Islamic world that were unpopular, inefficient, wasteful, self-servingly corrupt and unwilling to embark on the reforms that would have used wealth more efficiently and equitably to build a farsighted pattern of development.

Now, having backed and failed with the shah of Iran, having backed and failed with Saddam Hussein, the West is backing the generals in Algiers. Following the French lead, all the major Western powers supported the Algerian government when it canceled the second round of elections in early 1992 (the first free elections since independence) after it saw the Islamic fundamentalists win the first round. It was a narrow-sighted decision, and the beleaguered Algerian government is now under siege from an Islamic movement that has seen in a short two years its nonviolent, pro-democracy leadership taken over by quite ruthless political killers.

But Algeria does not have to be the first domino that goes on toppling throughout North Africa, even to that stalwart of Islamic rectitude, Saudi Arabia, producing militant anti-Western states, able to arm themselves with anything the ex-Soviet black market will provide. Some fundamentalists indeed may have a rough agenda of this sort. Most do not.

Most fundamentalists are moved by a down-to-earth search for values in a world that appears to have lost many of its bearings--the essential and timeless qualities of family life, integrity, probity and individual responsibility. It is often the fundamentalists in these countries who offer free medical treatment, clean the streets and distribute cheap photocopies of textbooks. Many of its ranks, compared with those that rule, are highly educated people, often prominent in the professions.

Fundamentalist movements, despite their public image, are in a number of countries democratically inclined. In Algeria, 2 1/2 years ago, the movement was certainly democratic. In Tunisia, it still is. Yet it is the secretive, violence-prone groups, the gamaat, that we most hear about and are taught to fear. They are strong and getting stronger; in Iran and Algeria, they have the upper hand.

There is a battle for the mind under way. The West, having little direct influence, can encourage the democratic seed wherever it sprouts. This means uncoupling itself from the economically satisfying but spiritually corrupting partnership with the arms buyers of the old order.

The West, moreover, must recall its own history more clearly. Christian culture for its first millennium and a half had no other tradition than autocracy. Islam will, I am sure, engage before long, if it hasn’t started already, in its own political Reformation and discover democracy for itself. But first it probably has to be purged by a spiritual Reformation. Fundamentalism is probably an unavoidable step along the way.

The West can choose to help or hinder this process. At the moment it appears to be making all the wrong decisions. The French for their own pathological reasons that lie deep in their tortured history with Algeria may be making a terrible mistake. But there is no good argument why the rest of the West has to follow them.