Why Are the Europeans Angry?

By Jordan Bonfante

The first mass demonstrations against the U.S. since the pacifist wave of 1983 erupted last week around U.S. military bases and in major West European cities from Milan to Madrid. Thousands marched through streets, calling President Reagan a murderer and demanding that their country withdraw from NATO. The protesters mirrored the official positions of most European governments. When the U.S. planes went into Libya, only the British government of Margaret Thatcher actively supported Reagan. The Mitterrand-Chirac administration in France, like Felipe Gonzalez Marquez's government in Spain, refused to let U.S. aircraft overfly the two countries. The Italian government of Bettino Craxi harshly criticized the operation, while Helmut Kohl's West Germany was anxiously quiet. TIME's Paris bureau chief, Jordan Bonfante, sent this report on the new strain in Atlantic relations:

Every evening at 8, one of the French TV networks, Antenne 2, begins its news broadcast in the same way. Eight close-up pictures, framed in lurid yellow appear on the screen, one after the other. As they go by, the anchorman says in an understated voice, "Tonight the French hostages, including the members of the Antenne 2 news team--Philippe Rochot, Georges Hansen, Aurel Cornea, Jean-Louis Normandin--have still not been released." Only then does the news begin.

The litany of the hostages, some of whom have been missing in Lebanon for more than a year, is an all-too-familiar evocation of President Carter's Iranian hostage dilemma of six years ago. And Western Europe's uncertainty and helpless fear of terrorism today resembles that of the Carter Administration in 1980.

Each of the major countries had its own reasons to protest. The French, in addition to being worried about their own eight hostages in the Middle East, had an irresistible Gaullist urge to preserve their military independence. "No blank checks," a French official said of Paris' refusal to go along with the U.S. action. Concurred a French army colonel: "We will not be the Americans' valet d'armes--their orderly or spear carrier." The Italians have an enduringly bad con-science about Mussolini's colonial war against Libya and, to be sure, are concerned about 4,000 Italians living there today. West German leaders appear to have chosen to indulge the strong, barely dormant pacifist streak in the country.

Nevertheless, the Europeans also share common reasons for opposing the American action. Among some leftists, including members of the West German Socialists and the British Labor Party, there is a fashionable attitude of blaming the U.S. for trying to stop terrorists rather than the terrorists for starting the bloodshed. A broader group of Europeans fear that since their continent, not the U.S., is the terrorists' battleground, they are most likely to suffer reprisals.

In addition, Europeans have a centuries-old proximity to, and affinity for, the Arab world that the U.S. not only does not share but too often fails to understand. Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Arch-bishop of Paris, points out that the French have a "fascination and aversion" toward the Arabs. "It goes back even to Poitiers, which, as every French schoolboy learns, was where Charles Martel stopped the Arab conquest of Europe in 732." Lustiger could have added that Europeans also have a way of becoming mired in their own history to the point of paralysis.

The Suez crisis of 1956 was the critical juncture, when their own weakness shocked the West European powers. Britain and France invaded Egypt but then had to stand down in the face of opposition from the U.S. With the possible exception of the Falklands war, no major foreign military expedition has been launched by the European countries. They have tended to opt out of first-rank international leadership, accept their demotion to medium-size power status and grudgingly leave responsibility for their defense to the U.S. This sometimes comfortable, sometimes melancholy provincialization of Western Europe has led to a softness on terrorism and reluctance to take action.

Perhaps the strongest case for Western Europe's opposition to the U.S. retaliation is the military one. European officers, indeed even some senior NATO figures, argue that the U.S. strike was not strong enough to attain its military objectives. It neither destroyed nor destabilized the Gaddafi regime. It may, instead, have compelled moderate Arab governments to rally behind Gaddafi. Mitterrand and Chirac complained to U.S. Envoy Vernon Walters that a limited bombing raid could stir up a new wave of Islamic extremism. "With a victory like that, who needs a defeat?" said Dominique Moisi, a French strategic expert.

Moisi and others, however, conclude that a questionable military mission may end up having a desirable political result, and will not have lasting effects on the alliance. "Paradoxically, it has forced the Europeans to take stronger measures against Gaddafi." he says. "European passivity forced the Americans into military action, and American military action has forced the Europeans out of their passivity. The crisis should be short-lived. Neither side can afford to let it get more serious or last too long."

Despite widespread opposition to the U.S. strike, a silent minority of Europeans approved. Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing spoke for them when he recalled how he sent French paratroops to quell an insurgency in Zaire in 1978. On that occasion, he noted gratefully, "our forces were conveyed from Corsica to Zaire by American planes." Giscard and Thatcher showed that not all Europeans have forgotten how allies, even when they disagree, sometimes have to stand by each other.