The Impact on Europe

The Impact on Europe
Even on the Continent, smug cynicism is suddenly out of fashion.

Saturday, September 22, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

As President Bush met this week with European allies to calibrate their commitment to a U.S.-led war on terrorism, he held cards that few other American presidents have held since just after World War II. Last week's attacks wounded the leading nation of the Free World, true, but they have also challenged the reigning attitudes of certain European political and intellectual elites for the first time in decades. And this is happening as the Continent's two giants, France and Germany, prepare for elections.

These attitudes can best be described as left-of-center, derisive of all things American and of military engagements in defense of freedom. They are supportive of Third World causes as long as such support doesn't imply opening Europe's markets to Third World products. They are not just cynical but celebratory of cynicism.

This intellectual posturing has always been a minority view, but has held sway because of the influence that such elites wield. But the attacks in New York and Washington are, for the time being anyway, calling this received wisdom into question.





This is the case principally because average Europeans have been touched en casa, at home in front of the telly, by the suffering of the U.S. and European victims and the dignity with which the American nation has reacted. Everywhere a very uncritical admiration for une grande nation has predominated.
That's the human side. But there's more; the attacks also have laid bare the incoherence of the political platitudes of the left. Now, the feeling that civilization has been attacked by barbarism is all too palpable. More worrying to the left, many Europeans are remembering that they form part of this civilization, together with the Americans.

The result is that gratitude for America's help against the Nazis, for reconstruction later through the Marshall Plan, and for defending the democracies during the Cold War--a feeling that had not informed bien pensant debate for decades--has now returned with a gush of emotion. One finds it in the airwaves and even in newspaper e***orials. Sizable majorities in Britain, France, Spain and Germany support an American retaliatory attack on the terrorists.

Most remarkable was Le Monde, which in a front-page e***orial recognized last Thursday that France owed its "freedom, and therefore its solidarity" to the United States. For an old-style left-wing newspaper that usually goes out of its way to associate America with Madonna, hamburgers and racial inequality, and that pours scorn on President Bush, this was something to behold.





Nobody knows how long any of this will last, to be sure, as the roots of pacifism are deep in Europe. But for the present those roots have been shaken. Some of the leaders who initially were hesitant to join a war on terrorism are now reconsidering. Those who from the start voiced their solidarity and said this terrorist attack will not stand are riding high in opinion polls.
In France, President Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist who is expected to run for re-election next year against the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, made full use of his role as the constitutional head of the armed forces and took the airwaves to reassure his nation. He also said France would be "totally supportive" of the United States.

He then left for the U.S. to become the first European leader to confer with Mr. Bush face to face. At the White House he was again forthright, telling Mr. Bush that the French are "completely determined to fight by your side this new type of evil, of absolute evil, which is terrorism."

For this Mr. Chirac has been richly rewarded, his popularity rising by an enormous six percentage points.

And Mr. Jospin? His hemming and hawing has taken him down to a 55% approval rating, putting clear blue water between him and his foe a mere six months before the elections. In an attempt to recoup, he visited the Paris Metro this week to witness security precautions firsthand. But as a wag put it to us, going down to the subway is not the best way to resurface politically, especially when your rival is at the White House discussing affairs of state at a moment of international crisis.





Gerhard Schroeder too has put distance between himself and his more dovish foreign minister, who also went to Washington, and his defense minister as well, saying almost as a rebuke, "You can't have a position of 'Wash my skin, but don't get me wet.' " Tapping into the general mood, he spoke of "a declaration of war against our entire civilization." Even the opposition has expressed admiration.
Messrs. Chirac and Schroeder, and Tony Blair in Britain too, may continue to reap the benefits of standing firm against terror well into the future if they continue to communicate with their countrymen as they have so far. Clearly, for the time being, the people want to hear a different message from those that have been so pervasive in Europe in the recent past.

Thanks for being there for me.​