Europe’s Own Painful Past Shapes Its Reaction to U.S. Death Penalty

The execution of Timothy McVeigh on Monday, just as President Bush was about to begin his week-long trip to Europe, touches on a point of contention with most if not all European countries: the U.S. death penalty, and especially its intense use in Texas while Bush was governor.

Given the enormity of McVeigh’s crime, this is one time the Europeans should steer clear of criticizing the United States. But with the depth of feeling on the Continent, reaction has already been swift, and Bush will hear about it on his travels.

Much of continental Europe’s opposition to the death penalty in the U.S. is, ironically, in direct response to its own home-grown inhumanity. The defeat of Fascism and Nazism in 1945, plus revelations of perhaps history’s greatest crime, the Holocaust, led to a generalized commitment: “Never again.”

Opposition to the death penalty is a deliberate rejection of past attitude and practice in which the most atrocious crimes were legitimized according to the very traditions of legality that they were systematically perverting. The Nuremberg Laws were “laws,” though enacted by a bastard process; executions even at places like Auschwitz-I often followed mock judicial procedures; and, of course, the communist system, all across captive Central and Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, used people’s courts or other seemingly judicial procedures to ratify politically motivated assaults on human rights, including capital punishment.

The “show trial,” followed by inevitable execution of the innocents, gave added impetus to West European determination to eliminate, wherever possible, a role for state power in such matters of life and death.

European rejection of the death penalty--including in countries like Britain, which stood firm against Nazism, and in others that were passive victims of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and their ilk--is thus not just a symbol of a more advanced civil society but a coming to terms with Europe’s past.

This spawned the creation of what is now the European Union, which was conceived first and foremost as a means to prevent a repetition of World War II. It also gave birth to a host of other European norms and institutions in the fields of law, human rights and civil society.

The Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights, for example, are more than just a debating society and a paper commitment, respectively, to doing things differently. The latter, in fact, echoes the U.S. Constitution’s 8th Amendment by outlawing “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Russia was recently threatened with expulsion from the Council of Europe if it reintroduces the death penalty. And the European Union requires any aspirant to membership to outlaw capital punishment.

Thus, Europeans’ taking President Bush and other death penalty proponents to task is not simply an extension of earlier chastising of U.S. attitudes about race (where, incidentally, America has made far greater strides than most European countries, especially in dealing with the impact of immigrants “of color”). Nor is it just resentment of what is seen to be U.S. inconsistency in supporting human rights or in a class with criticism of some aspects of U.S. culture, like Hollywood’s excesses.

Perhaps the last thing that many Americans want, especially proponents of the death penalty, is interference from abroad, and especially from Europeans--residents of a continent clearly lacking in “clean hands” after a century of mass barbarism from which, in fact, the U.S. more than once played a major role of deliverance.

Instead, we should see European criticism of capital punishment as a tribute to the United States, which from 1942 to 1989 and beyond was crucial in restoring human freedoms, democratic ideals and humane values to a continent so ravaged during the 20th century.

Europe’s history and its devotion to American values are precisely the point of its opposing continued use of the death penalty by the world’s leading democracy.