The View From Abroad

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/weekinreview/04bern.html

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: September 4, 2005

Berlin

THEY were perhaps a bit slow, but the expressions of sympathy and offers of aid in the wake 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, two airplanes, 35 members of civil security rescue teams, and other equipment and personnel.

Still, Europe's response so far to the calamity of Katrina has been complicated, even ambivalent. There was plenty of sympathy and willingness to help, but there was also, as with Mr. de Villepin's offer, a rather formulaic quality and an absence of any powerful, spontaneous surge of empathy and affection for the afflicted nation.

Why?

It is hard to measure this, but judging from the commentary and the blogs, the collective European response to the victims of the tsunami or the famine in Niger, to the killings in Darfur or the deaths of Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad seems to have been more immediate and deeply felt than for the victims of Katrina. And one reason for this relative coolness may be that these other disasters took place in poor, troubled nations, not in the most powerful and richest country on earth.

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