“Apocalypse,” “Who? Why?” “A Declaration of War”: European Press Responds to Sept. 11 Attacks

By Lucy Jones

The horrifying, now-familiar pictures of the World Trade Center’s twin towers exploding covered Europe’s front pages following Sept. 11’s devastation. Some led with CNN’s interpretation of events: “America Under Attack.” London’s Daily Mail flashed “Apocalypse” across its front page on Sept. 12, and London’s Mirror warned of a “War on the World.” On the same day, The Guardian and The Express in Britain opted for the more sober headline, “A Declaration of War,” which appeared above photos of the smoke and destruction. Picturing a man walking among the World Trade Center rubble, the French Catholic daily La Croix of Sept. 12 simply asked, “Who? Why?”

“We are all Americans,” says France’s Le Monde

Almost universally, European editorialists expressed solidarity with the U.S. “We are all Americans, we are all New Yorkers,” said a Sept. 12 editorial in France’s sometimes unashamedly anti-American Le Monde. “One cannot but feel...deep solidarity with the people and the country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our liberty,” it continued. Commented the Spanish daily El Pais on Sept. 12,“What has happened in the U.S. may just as well happen in Europe.”

To anyone looking for lofty motivations for the attacks, Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung on the same day had this to say: “for the perpetrators the meaning of their acts is the wicked deed itself. These people do not want a better, fairer world,” the newspaper continued. “They simply want to wipe ours off their map.”

U.S. Military Unprepared, Says Russian Daily

Only in the Russian press was it possible to detect a less sympathetic response. “The only surviving superpower has suffered a blow of unprecedented force” said the Sept. 12 Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “Washington’s military department, which is called upon reliably to protect the whole country could not even protect itself.” The newspaper went on to say that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had warned the U.S. government that “the USA might become the arena of acts of terrorism in the future, if the government was not more active in its efforts to reach a settlement in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Drawing a comparison with Chechnya, Moskovsky Komsomolets noted the same day that there was no tangible enemy, thus making it difficult to bring to justice those responsible for the act. Although it is a situation “Russian servicemen are up against every day,” the paper continued, “Chechnya, just like all Arabs in the U.S. case, cannot be brushed under the carpet.”

Analysis Follows Initial Shock

But when the shock subsided, the European press became less impassioned and more analytical. “For many Americans,” remarked Britain’s Guardian on Sept. 14, “one of the most shocking aspects of Tuesday’s carnage was the jubilant scenes it triggered in some parts of the world. The temptation is to discount the cheers as the ravings of the psychologically disturbed. This would be a mistake. Alongside the Middle East, there is the wider global perception of America as the world policeman that keeps making up the law as it goes along. With the Soviet Union gone, U.S. international hegemony, ranging from trade to military intervention, has opened it to accusations of hypocrisy.”

Germany’s SŸddeutsche Zeitung of Sept. 15 echoed the sentiment. “The World Trade Center and the Pentagon are symbols of an America that so many people around the world hate,” the newspaper wrote. “The World Trade Center stands for the unlimited power of money, whereas the Pentagon is the home of those world policemen who are protecting it.”

The myths of “America being able to defend itself alone,” of the impossibility of “war on U.S. soil” and of the country’s “invincibility” have been shattered, said Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza on Sept. 18. London’s Independent of Sept. 15 foresaw a shift in the U.S. national character. “The spirit of the Blitz is not something Americans have experienced collectively, even in a previous generation,” it noted. “They are not used to collective insecurity, except personal insecurity on dangerous city streets. And as a people, they are not accustomed to having their authority—or their innate goodness or rightness—challenged. When that challenge is as devastating and as comprehensive as it was yesterday, optimism will give way to angst,” read an editorial.

U.S. Must Reassess “unqualified support for Israel”

Several writers, in their search for the “underlying causes” of the carnage, looked toward Israel. In the Sept. 16 Observer, veteran columnist Richard Ingram wrote: “Noticeable was the reluctance throughout the media to contemplate the Israeli factor—the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony, sustained by billions of American dollars and armed with American missiles, helicopters and tanks.”

The Observer editorialized that the U.S. needs to understand why it earns so much hostility around the world. “It will, in particular, make little progress without coming to terms with the consequences of its unqualified support for Israel and the deeply disquieting methods that country is using to sustain its position in Palestine,” the paper wrote. “No progress in a ‘war’ against international terrorism is possible without stopping the Israeli settler movement and one of its consequences, more than a million people living in refugee camps: it is as simple as that.”

Mideast Cease-Fire Welcomed As “Encouraging Sign”

Many wondered what impact the attacks would have on the already desperate situation in the Middle East. Some newspapers feared that repeatedly televised pictures of Palestinians celebrating the terrorist attack would do little to help the Palestinian cause. “Expect the U.S. to be even less critical of Israeli security policies in the future—and possibly, even more hostile to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian cause,” said London’s liberal Guardian on Sept. 15.

A week later, however, the European press saw a “glimmer of hope” when, on Sept. 18, following Yasser Arafat’s declaration of a cease-fire, Israel agreed to withdraw from areas under Palestinian control and halt its offensive operations. “The fact that in the shadow of the attacks in New York and Washington and in the face of the threat of massive U.S. retaliation against Islamist extremists, Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon are trying to de-escalate the situation is an encouraging sign,” said Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau on Sept. 18.

That same day the Italian La Stampa described the reciprocal moves as “a truce more credible than all those that preceded it.” And it came about, the newspaper pointed out, “because this time the United States has brought huge pressure to bear” on both sides. Arafat, the paper noted, “would not want to be cast among the enemies” of an international coalition, while Israel’s Sharon “has agreed to step aside” because he “does not want to hinder the global antiterrorist war promised by the United States.” It is “a difficult trick to bring off,” the paper editorialized, but it will serve as “the first test of something we have heard so many times, namely that nothing will ever be the same again.”

A commentator in the Portuguese Expresso of Sept. 18believed developments in the Middle East could determine the success or failure of a joint international drive against those behind the Sept. 11 carnage in the United States and against world terrorism in general. “We must deprive the terrorists,” the paper said, “as well as the states harboring them, of their political and economic arguments.” To this end, it added, “the United States and Europe must become deeply committed to a definitive resolution of the Palestinian question.” As the paper saw it, “the whole world is sitting on a powder keg called Israel,” and this powder keg is also “the ultimate reason” for Islamic fundamentalism.

Failure to address this problem might lead to a so-called “clash of civilizations,” the paper noted. Missing in such a clash, it added, is the “balance of terror” which, during the Cold War, prevented the adversaries from using nuclear weapons. “It is far from certain,” Expresso concluded, “that chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons would not be used in such a scenario.”

France’s Le Monde on Sept. 18 reported that President Jacques Chirac had gone to Washington the previous day with some basic messages from France and its European Union partners. One of those messages, the paper noted, was that “the United States, Europe and the Middle East countries must join forces to revive the peace process and press Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table.”

European support not “blank check for U.S.”

The appropriate response to the terrorist attacks—especially as, from an early stage, it was clear Europe would be involved—consumed pages in the European press. “It took less than an hour to bring down the World Trade Center. Destroying relations amongst nations,” warned London’s Guardian on Sept. 17, “can be just as quick.”

Spain’s El Pais of Sept. 20 cautioned that European solidarity does not mean a blank check for the U.S. So far, the paper commented, President Bush has reacted “calmly.” Any mistake, however, could have fatal results for the international alliance Washington is seeking to form, it added.

Italy’s La Repubblica said Sept. 21 that if President Bush were to give the order to attack Afghanistan, the Islamic world, with the exception of Iraq, would be paralyzed. “On the one hand,” the paper explained, “its governments could not free themselves from the necessity of showing solidarity with the U.S. On the other hand, their people have demonstrated their opposition to U.S. policies, and if U.S. bombs were to kill Muslim civilians there would be an outcry.”

London’s Sunday Telegraph of Sept. 30 blustered that the choice was between “appeasement or war.…The appeasers argue that retaliation will be a recruiting sergeant for terrorism, and that is probably so. But to argue that for the West to do nothing would have the opposite effect is nonsense.” The editorial reflected Britain’s unflinching support for the United States as a matter of obligation—and managed to take a few digs at European politicians: “Twice in the last century,” it pointed out, “this country and others like it were saved by American intervention. Alliance carries with it obligations, and it is encouraging that Tony Blair’s support for the president has been so robust in contrast to the deplorably equivocal remarks made by Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister, and Louis Michel, the Belgian foreign minister and current holder of the EU presidency, who simply said: ‘We are not at war.’ Yes, we are, Mr. Michel,” the paper concluded, “as NATO has already agreed.”

Italian PM Calls Western Civilization “Superior” to Islam

The bickering in Europe continued after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suggested that Western civilization is superior to Islam. “Mr Berlusconi’s diatribe,” France’s Liberation said on Sept. 28, “has aroused the anger of the Arab League,” caused “consternation” and “embarrassment” among his fellow European leaders, and forced the European Union’s current Belgian leadership “to step into the breach in an attempt to limit its disastrous impact.” Berlusconi, the paper added, “stressed the need to Westernize the world precisely at a time when the European Union is rallying to avert a clash of civilizations with Islam.”

What was wrong with the statements, said the Italian La Stampa on the same day,was not “the vigorous emphasis on the premises upon which Western civilization is based,” but the fact that Berlusconi “went about it the wrong way, without style and without method.”

“At this grave and dangerous moment in international life,” said Italy’s L’Unita on Sept. 27, “Silvio Berlusconi cuts such a petty figure that even his political opponents are embarrassed.”

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in London.