A lorry can always be driven into a crowd in any open society. Terrorism of the sort seen at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin on Monday will always be possible. Considered dispassionately, the fact that it happens so rarely should tell us more than the fact that it happens at all. The worst reaction possible is over-reaction.
To be dispassionate against a backdrop of a market strewn with crushed bodies, however, is too great a task for most of us. Twelve are dead and scores are injured, many severely. This was an assault not just against Germans or the western world. It was also an attack on community, on families, on stability and on Christmas and Christianity. The primary aim of terrorism is to sow terror. It succeeded. Briefly.
The attack mirrored that of the lorry assault on Bastille Day crowds in Nice in July which killed 86, and others in Nantes and Dijon in 2014. The so-called Islamic State is known to have advocated such methods and the first person arrested by German police matched the expected profile of such an attacker: a 23-year-old recent migrant thought to be originally from Pakistan. It soon became apparent that he was not involved. Germany is waiting to see whether or not the culprit is one of the hundreds of thousands of migrants that it has taken in over the past two years, or indeed if the motive was Islamist at all. With the vast majority of European terrorism being carried out by people born and raised on the continent, the former should not be an all-important consideration. Within Germany, however, it will be politically.
“I know that it would be particularly difficult for all of us to bear if it is confirmed that this deed was carried out by a person who sought protection and asylum in Germany,” Angela Merkel said. The chancellor plans to run for a fourth term next year. Until now, the direct threat she has faced from the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing Eurosceptic party, has been relatively minor. Yet the spate of assaults linked to recent migrants has buoyed its support. Most notably, a mass sexual assault last New Year’s Eve in Cologne, initially largely ignored by the media, has made many Germans question the wisdom of Mrs Merkel’s open-door policy and challenge perceived political correctness.
Mrs Merkel has a reputation for caution which is not always wholly deserved. Germany’s decision to welcome more than a million migrants last year, almost overnight, was a bold attempt to deal with a refugee crisis that threatened to destabilise southern Europe. Yet it was also sudden and without a public mandate. It could be grouped with her equally sudden decision to abandon Germany’s nuclear power programme after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
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Mrs Merkel’s gamble over migrants was driven by a sense that German leadership was required, both practically and morally. “Wir schaffen das,” she has said many times since, or “we can manage this”. Her stance has not been without costs. In September her Christian Democratic Party plunged to its lowest ever level in Berlin’s state elections, with the AfD the primary beneficiary. Since then her tone has been firmer. She told delegates at her party conference this month that the full facial veil should be banned “wherever it is legally possible”.
There are few countries, even so, that remain as tolerant and welcoming of cultural difference. There are also few western nations that have been less involved in the military interventions that apologists for Islamist terror invariably cite as its cause. The horror of Breitscheidplatz should remind us that terrorism is never truly a response, but always a sickness. All democracies are susceptible to its symptoms and this is not a weakness, but our greatest strength.