Europe Embraces U.S. in Dark Hour

Until six days ago, the historic friendship between the United States and Europe was enduring a prickly phase.

In European capitals, anti-U.S. grumbling was on the rise about issues great and small: the Middle East, the death penalty, genetically modified foods, the perceived aloofness of the Bush administration.

Then came the airborne horror in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. And in the dreadful minutes it took for two skyscrapers to disappear from the world’s best-known skyline, the transatlantic sniping was wiped away by a rush of sympathy and solidarity.

The chips are down, and Europeans have rediscovered their many bonds--political, military, cultural--to the United States. There are fears on the street about what could happen next and appeals to Washington for restraint and caution, but there is also genuine grief.

In London on Sunday, the tears kept coming two days after an official day of mourning brought Europe to a standstill. More than 21,000 Britons have flocked to the U.S. Embassy in London since Friday. They lined up around the block carrying flowers, Union Jacks, American candy bars, stuffed animals and condolence cards, enduring metal-detector checks to pay their respects at a statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square.

The size of the crowds was a reminder that many Europeans see nothing corny or outmoded about being pro-American.

“I guess Britons have a love-hate relationship with the Yanks: They’re brash and they’ve got everything,” said David Thomas Coakley, 51, a former chef on the Queen Elizabeth II ocean liner and a frequent traveler to New York. “But I love America and Americans. Our world owes America. They saved us in the war; people forget that. I’ve got no beef with the Yanks.”

Those words were echoed at memorial services all over the continent and in numerous gestures--whether Italian firefighters volunteering to aid in New York rescues or families in Berlin and Paris inundating U.S. embassies with offers of shelter for stranded U.S. travelers.

“The mourning of Europe is so visible, the mourning of France is so profound, that this has become a political fact,” said the influential French newspaper Le Figaro in an editorial Saturday. “The Americans, who for a long time had not been more than allies, have suddenly become friends once again. But solidarity does not mean following in lock-step.”

That caveat reflects concern about the repercussions of expected U.S. military retaliation against the authors of last week’s deadly destruction. Americans now know what it is to suffer carnage on their home soil, Europeans say. Like older friends speaking from painful experience, they urge the U.S. not to strike out blindly or in haste.

“I feel like I did the day the wall was built in this city,” said Hans Arndt, a pensioner in Berlin. “And I imagine that is how Americans are feeling at this time. I want to tell them I share their grief and their rage, but they should try to stay calm and collected. Pure revenge will not help.”

National leaders, meanwhile, reiterated their resolve to support President Bush’s next move. British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared twice Sunday that Britain was “at war.”

Spain’s defense minister reiterated his country’s offer of air bases for any retaliatory strike. “If the United States seeks authorization to use the Spanish bases, it will have it without conditions,” Defense Minister Federico Trillo told the El Mundo newspaper. “Spain will act without any reservations as an active member of NATO because we have suffered from terrorism more than anybody.”

Trillo alluded to Basque terrorists whose continuing campaign of bombings and assassinations has racked up more than 800 victims in 23 years.

For the Irish and Italians, meanwhile, another human connection lies in the history of immigration to the U.S., especially New York.

And on much of the continent, postwar democracies and popular tastes--music, movies, food--were shaped in large part by the United States.

“We feel close to the Americans,” said Marie Hadow, 60, one of the Britons who visited the U.S. Embassy on Sunday to sign condolence books. “They’re on our TV screens all the time. It’s like our own country, in a way.”

Similarly, Germans took the assault on symbols of American lifestyle and values as a denunciation of their own. The reaction was intensely personal, notably among those old enough to remember the helping hand extended from across the Atlantic during the lean years after World War II.

German affection for Americans is rooted in both a 300-year history of emigration to the United States and the generous aid provided to homeless and hungry Germans after the Third Reich was vanquished. The U.S. Marshall Plan fed millions, rebuilt schools and industries, and helped the postwar leaders draft a framework for a new democracy.

Germany’s ambassador to UNESCO, Ute Ohoven, seemed to capture her countrymen’s sentiments when she made reference to President Kennedy’s memorable 1963 declaration to Berliners that he was one of them. The ambassador wrote: “After the horrors of Tuesday, we must all be Americans.”

Today, North America is the top vacation destination for Germans. One tangible aspect of the urban renaissance of New York in the 1990s was the presence of throngs of European tourists in Manhattan.

Expressing Italy’s century-old affection for New York, a bastion of all things Italian American, Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni planted a cypress tree near the Circus Maximus in honor of the victims. He offered to withdraw Rome’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics if New York wanted the Games.

The 40 members of the Rome fire department’s search and rescue unit all volunteered to travel to New York to aid in scouring the rubble of lower Manhattan. Like many other foreign teams, they were ultimately told their help was not needed.

“All I know is that many of my brothers across the ocean have been buried beneath the ruins,” said Franco Schinelli, a burly firefighter with outsize hands and 30 years on the job. “You will never see a fireman cry in public, but we are crying inside in silence. You have to do this work to understand how impotent we feel just sitting here.”

In harsh contrast to those sentiments, on Bush’s European swing this summer he encountered demonstrators in Italy, Spain and Sweden who saw him as a poster child of supposed American arrogance and ignorance about the world. Aside from the rage at the Group of 8 economic summit in Genoa, however, the protests were far more subdued than those that greeted President Nixon in the early 1970s.

“Italians love the United States,” said Sen. Tana De Zulueta. “The political hostility has become a lot more focused than it was in the 1960s and ‘70s. It’s more about policies: Bush’s missile shield, the Kyoto treaty [on global warming], debt relief for Africa. It’s not the same broad expression against U.S. ‘imperialism’ that we saw during the Cold War.”

The aftermath of the tragedy appears to have caused reflection and regret about the gratuitous nature of some anti-Americanism.

“After the catastrophe of last Tuesday, we [Europeans] are going to feel like orphans,” predicted columnist Jean Daniel in France’s Le Nouvel Observateur magazine. “The debates about anti-Americanism are going to become frivolous.”

During a memorial ceremony outside the U.S. Embassy in Paris on Friday, members of France’s Jewish community said they hope the grim new global reality will quiet the shrill voices that had excoriated the United States, an ally, while seeming to excuse Middle Eastern terrorists who are a threat to Europe.

“I don’t understand some of the intellectuals, the journalists in France,” said photographer Charles Tordjman, growing indignant as he talked. “I don’t understand their semantics when they are talking about enemies of civilization. They always talk about militants rather than terrorists. Now they’ve changed their tone. Did it take 5,000 dead for them to call a dog a dog?”

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Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Rome, Marjorie Miller in London and Carol Williams in Berlin contributed to this report.