The London bombings of 7 July 2005 stirred painful memories and bitter political disputes in Spain. The similarities with the explosions in Madrid of 11 March 2004 which killed 193 people are too evident: target (urban public transport), timing (the rush hour) and victim (innocent people from a range of countries). The affinities between 7-J (as the event is known in Spain) and 11-M made the Spanish reaction particularly intimate.
The outrage has created widespread sympathy for Londoners and Britain from Spanish politicians and public. In Barcelona, the night of 14 July witnessed a moving concert of the greatest contemporary Catalan singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, the first since a serious illness. Serrat, on behalf of all the staff of the concert venue, presented his performance as a demonstration of liberty and democracy.
The Spanish press has published reports on the London investigations alongside portraits of Londoners reactions: the tears and the stoicism (and the occasional joke), the pubs and the flowers, the poem on the triumph of love over death by Elisabeth Barrett Browning left at a bombsite, but also the inexpressible rage of people at these sudden killings in their midst.
There is a vast reserve of Anglophilia in Spain, much of it based on somewhat archaic stereotypes about Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. This extends to a voracious interest in current events and commentaries. So Spanish readers very soon had access to leading writers' responses to the bomb attacks Ian McEwan, Tariq Ali, Mary Kaldor. Such connections reinforced Spaniards' immediate instinct of solidarity with London.
Terror and politics
But the contrasts between the Madrid and London attacks may be more significant in the longer term. 11-M was a total surprise, 7-J was not; the London dead (presently 52) are far fewer; and the bombed London trains were all (as Ian McEwan noted in an article reprinted in El Pais) underground and invisible.
There are more complex, and irresolvable, differences. If the London bombings provoked instant domestic political unity, Madrids had the opposite effect: within days, the election of the socialist government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was the prelude to months of dispute between the PSOE and the ousted Popular Party over responsibility for the bombings, and esepcially over the attempt by the PP and its leader José María Aznar in particular to put the initial blame on the Basque separatists ETA.
The ensuing months have not allayed this division. Indeed, Spanish politics is now more divided than at any time since the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s, and on a range of issues: gay marriage, the relationship between the state and the Catholic church, policy on Iraq, the renegotiation of Catalan autonomy (the dominant media story in Barcelona), the removal of remaining statues of Francisco Franco from public places and most pointedly whether to engage in talks with ETA.
A parliamentary commission on the bombings, which dragged on amidst acrimony for a year, recently submitted its report. It blamed the PP both for failing adequately to monitor the rise of Islamist groups and for its immediate reaction to the bombings itself. Needless to say, the PP has refused to endorse the report.
In some ways both the PSOE and the PP remain prisoners of their, inevitably partisan, responses in March 2004: the PP deny that the bombings had anything to do with the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq, the PSOE deny their electoral victory three days later had anything to do with the bombings. The messages of Tony Blair, and of Churchill (we will never surrender), are differently used: by the left to rally support against terrorism, by the right to oppose any negotiation with ETA.
Other contrasts touch exposed nerves. The slowness with which the London police have identified the victims and published their names has surprised many Spaniards: in Madrid, lists of names were issued within hours (though the explosions were above ground, and all Spaniards must carry an identity card). By Sunday the owner of my local newspaper shop in the sedate and leafy Caller Madrazo, was indignant: If I was in London and I thought my son was in there I would be demanding to look for him! she proclaimed: no quiero ser Inglesa (I do not want to be English!).
She was equally clear about the need to publish photographs showing the violence in graphic terms: Spanish papers, while not going as far as those in the Arab world, do show photographs, as they did after 9/11 and 11-M, which the British press and TV would not show. For example, Spanish TV repeatedly showed film of people jumping from the twin towers in Manhattan, and of bodies on the railway tracks at Atocha.
Both sides of the Spanish argument link this to the question of the proper political response to terrorism. Some argue that publishing such pictures is playing the terrorists game of promoting fear among the public, and even accuse the press of being accomplices of the terrorists; others say that you can mobilise support against terrorism only by showing people what terrorism does to bodies and cities.
It is a matter of balancing three factors: the right to dignity and privacy of the victims, the public right to know, and the need to register horror and grief at these atrocities. The virtually complete censorship in the United States for the victims of 9/11 as for the military casualties of Iraq would command little support in Spain.
IRA, ETA, and jihadis
Two even larger differences between Madrid and London go closer to the heart of the modern politics and history of their two countries.
The first is the public response. Much is made, with reason, of the calm dignity and resilience of British people after 7 July. The remarkable contrast is by no means with a confused or excessively emotional Spain after 11 March, but with the political response of its people, its parties, and its civil society.
After the Madrid bombings, 12 million people demonstrated in the streets of Spains cities and towns, denouncing violence and upholding the values of democracy. The same thing has happened, on numerous occasions, after ETA assassinations of politicians and writers. That neither ETA nor the jihadis care about these popular mobilisations is not the point: they express a deep, popular commitment to democracy that has its roots in the Franco era or even before, and they testify to a depth of civil society that Britain (and certainly the United States) signally lacks. The contrast with London where the Trafalgar Square gathering of 14 July is so far the only sizeable collective response is notable.
The second contrast, deeply engrained in Spanish popular thinking and the reflexes of the state alike, concerns the relationship between the earlier, indigenous terrorist projects of ETA and the IRA respectively and the more recent Islamist campaigns.
In Britain, no overt link is made: no politician has, to my knowledge, tried to link Gerry Adams to the jihadis. Indeed, the whole issue of violence in Ireland remains extraordinarily separate from, almost outside of, political and intellectual debate in Britain. Although the numbers (4,000) killed in the Northern Ireland conflict since 1969 are far more than those (800) killed in ETAs Basque campaigns since the first incidents of 1959, Ireland has almost always been at the margins of British political debate and elections.
Even more striking in Britain is the paucity of response by intellectuals and writers to the troubles in political theory, discussion of the ethics of violence, nationalism and community, or in art and literature. In Spain, intellectuals and writers (and politicians) are acutely aware of the whole experience of the Basque country. Many novels (Bernardo Atxagas The Lone Man, for example) explore the violence of the Basque experience. In a discussion on Radio SER on the night of 7 July, I could not but feel from my Spanish interlocutors the visceral, democratic loathing of what ETA had done and attempted over a long period.
Thinking with the heart
Each country, like each individual, responds to terror in terms of a distinct past, with its accumulated sense of identity, honour and fear. There is no correct way.
My own personal response to 7 July 2005 is shaped by proximity to the equally devastating, if accidental, fire in Kings Cross - the London bombings epicentre - on 18 November 1987 which killed thirty-one people . That evening, I changed underground trains on returning home from a BBC television discussion with Michael Ignatieff and Malise Ruthven on, of all topics, the politics of Islam. At the moment the ticket-hall exploded, I felt sure this was an IRA bomb.
The many thousands of people intimately affected by the Madrid and London bombs will carry their own memories and associations for a long time. The British peoples instant reactions draw on the strengths of their past and deserve respect. Yet without seeking to impose a Spanish prejudice onto British public life, there is from the outside something disturbing, cold almost obscene about the public and official calm that has followed this event.
The sight of senior members of Britains royal family at a London celebration of second world war victory on 10 July smirking and strutting on their palace balcony, dressed in ridiculous quasi-imperial garb seemed particularly unseemly from afar. The French say that les états son des êtres froids (states are cold beings). So too, of course, are terrorists. Among such coldness, people in London, Madrid and many other cities seek within themselves the resources to understand, survive, and meet the challenge of modern terrorism.
