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Europe's response: An odd mixture

By Richard Bernstein The New York Times

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2005


BERLIN They were perhaps a bit slow, but the expressions of sympathyand offers of aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina did materialize in Europe through the week.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany declared, "Our American friends should know that we are standing by them." The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, offered to send supplies, 2 airplanes and about 35 French civil security troops from the Caribbean, presumably to help maintain order in New Orleans.

Still, Europe's response to the calamity of Katrina is a complicated mixture. To be sure, there was plenty of normal empathy and willingness to help a longtime ally and former savior, but much of it, like Villepin's offer of troops, seemed rather formulaic, a going through the motions without being motivated by any genuine surge of affection for an afflicted nation.

Why? For one thing, there are other disasters occupying the minds of many Europeans - the famine in Niger, the deaths of Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad, the killings in Darfur, Sudan - are taking place in poor countries less able to take care of themselves than the most powerful and the richest country on earth.

It is hard to measure this, but judging from the commentary and the blogs, the collective European sorrow for the victims of the tsunami, and certainly for Sept. 11, seems to have been more immediate and deeply felt than for the victims of Katrina, and this is not only because the tsunami was far vaster in its destructiveness. It is also because the tsunami victims were, by and large, poor. But there are other factors at work here, notably that the spectacle of the hurricane causing a disaster of third world proportions in the United States seems to have provoked a sort of dismay among Europeans mingling with the sorrow.

As a reporter on BBC Television said on Friday, not able to keep the anger from his voice, the looting, the armed gangs, the gunplay, and, especially, the arrogance, in his view, that mostly white police displayed toward mostly black residents, represented "the dark underbelly of life in this country."

There is something shameful about the way a natural disaster has produced behavior that, for example, the tsunami did not produce in the third world countries it hit, and it is painful to be a witness to somebody else's shame.

"Why should hundreds die, mostly African-Americans, in a predicted disaster in the richest nation on earth," was one expression of a widespread feeling in Europe, this one appearing Friday in a letter in the Guardian, the British paper.

There were many comments to the effect that earlier predictions of the disaster did not lead public officials to make sure the levees would withstand any possible onslaught, and there was the unspoken opinion that such would not have been the case, say, with the likes of the Netherlands, or in any of the rich European countries.

"These are incredible scenes from the richest and the biggest country in the world," an anchorman, Jean-Pierre Pernaut, said on one of the main midday French news program on Friday. On the competing channel, the news program had an interview with a specialist on the United States, Nicole Bacharan, who said, "These images reveal to the world the reality in the southern states: the poverty of 37 million Americans."

A few environmentalists in Europe clearly seized on the situation to express one of their greatest irritations: namely the unwillingness of the Bush administration to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Exhibit number one in this regard would seem to be Jürgen Trittin, the German environment minister, though others in Europe echoed this sentiment. "The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina - in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures - can visit on his country," Trittin said.

But Trittin's comment, while headline grabbing in Germany, provoked as much outrage as approval.

"Instead of standing by the Americans as they try to get to grips with the hurricane catastrophe, our environment minister Trittin shows the world the face of the ugly German," the mass circulation Bild Zeitung wrote Friday. A British commentator, Gerard Baker, called comments like that of Trittin and a few others examples of "intellectual looting"; it was, he said, "the predictable exploitation of tragedy for political purposes."

But Baker also went on to make the point that the real problem was the inherent inequality of suffering. "The tragedy has been visited disproportionately, indeed almost exclusively, on the city's African-Americans," he wrote.

In other words, no doubt most Europeans feel sorry over what happened, and many will no doubt contribute to the funds that will be set up to help the victims.

At the same time, the particular circumstances of New Orleans and Biloxi have tended to confirm many of the worst visions of America that prevail in Europe, the vision of a country of staggering inequalities, of a kind of political indifference to the general welfare (especially in the Bush administration), and an absence of what the Europeans call "solidarity."

As that BBC reporter put it, there were no scenes of armed gangs of looters in gun battles with police in Sri Lanka after the tsunami.

That things have gone so badly so quickly after the storm in New Orleans has produced something beyond sympathy in Europe: disappointment, distress, fear that a major city in the world's most powerful nation could have fallen into something that looks, from this side of the Atlantic, like anarchy.