Is Europe getting tough on terror?

By CNN European Political Editor Robin Oakley

LONDON, England (CNN) -- European leaders have given full backing to U.S. efforts to build a coalition against terrorism. They've promised a whole range of new measures -- fast track extradition, multi-country arrest warrants, Europe-wide lists of suspects.

But how tough will Europe prove in practice? European countries have a long track record of being soft on terrorism:

* 1972: Massacre at the Munich Olympics, 11 Israeli athletes killed. Germany seeks extradition of terrorist suspect Abu Daoud, but France lets him go and he disappears.

* 1985: Terrorists seize hostages on the Achille Lauro cruise liner. U.S. fighters force the fleeing hijackers' plane to land at an Italian NATO airbase, but Italy refuses to hand them over to the U.S. and allows their leader, Mohamed Abu Abbas, to escape to what was then Yugoslavia.

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* 1999: Turkey can't get terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan extradited from Germany or France and finally has to seize him with a commando raid in Kenya.

* Egypt lists its wanted men on an official national Web site. At least one of them, Yasser al-Siri, convicted in his absence of a terrorist bombing, still lives in Britain, which has so far refused to extradite him.

Europe's police forces have swept into action after the New York bombing, detaining those suspected of terrorist connections in France, Spain and the UK.

Many argue security must now take priority over liberal traditions. Is this a sign of change?

"I think the British people are beginning to ask now of their politicians, 'It's time you toughened up,' and of the judges, 'Whose side are you on?' It is their job to protect the interests of the British people, not the people who come here and exploit British hospitality to attack our friends and, I believe, to be ready, willing and able to attack us," says former UK Cabinet minister David Mellor.

But civil liberties groups argue against what they see as knee-jerk reactions.

"Legislation is cheap. Governments always rush to legislate as a cheap way of assuaging public opinion. Nothing I've heard yet suggests that any of the tragic events of two weeks ago could have been prevented by the measures that are currently being promised," says Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.

Britain's minister responsible for internal security acknowledges the dilemma.

"We can't allow terrorists to exploit our freedom, to exploit our democracy and then destroy it. But we can't allow them either to provoke us into a situation where we are so tight on our laws that we actually remove those very freedoms that we have built up over the last 200 years," says UK Home Secretary David Blunkett.

With tabloid papers demanding tough action, Muslims living in Europe fear their freedoms will be eroded by new laws. They argue they shouldn't suffer for a tiny minority of terrorist sympathisers, recalling how the same alarm calls were raised before the Gulf War 10 years ago.

"We were under the same propaganda campaign. We were told by the media, by the tabloids in particular, that, you know, Arab terrorists in smart designer suits with a Samsonite briefcase would be releasing VX nerve gas substance on the London Underground, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent British," says Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor Abdel Bari Atwan.

"The war passed, Iraq was bombed, thousands of people were killed from the Iraqi side and we haven't had one single Arab or Muslim terrorist taking revenge in this country or any other European country."

They insist too that extradition practices should not change where some countries are concerned. .

"Actually the British government is right not to cooperate with any Middle East countries which are asking for extradition of certain elements. Simply because all of these Middle East governments are dictatorships. They are governing their people with martial law, with emergency laws. You don't have a proper judicial system there. It is usually military courts (that) sentence people to death," says Abdel Bari Atwan.

Europe isn't without its own experience of national terrorist atrocities -- the Red Brigades in Italy, ETA in Spain, the IRA in the UK.

But international terrorism, all European Union governments are agreed, is posing a new threat which requires new measures. The question is just how much to change your society in response.