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Rob Kroes, European Anti-Americanism: What's New?, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 417–431, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486239
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“Nous sommes tous Américains.”We are all Americans. Such was the rallying cry of Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor-in-chief of the French newspaper Le Monde published two days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against symbols of America's power. He went on to say: “We are all New Yorkers, as surely as John Kennedy declared himself, in 196[3] in Berlin, to be a Berliner.”While Colombani evoked Kennedy's historic declaration for his readers, an even older use of this rhetorical call to solidarity may come to mind. It is Thomas Jeferson's call for unity after America's first taste of two party strife. Leading the opposition forces to victory in the presidential election of 1800, he assured Americans that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists”and urged his audience to rise above the differences that many feared might divide the young nation against itself. Clearly, there would have been no need for such a ringing rhetorical call if there had not been an acute sense of difference and division at the time. The same could be said of Colombani's timely expression of solidarity with an ally singled out for a vengeful attack, solely because it had come to represent the global challenge posed by a shared Western way of life. An attack against America was therefore an attack against common values held dear by all who live by standards of democracy and the open society that it implies. But as in Jeferson's case, the rhetorical urgency of the call for solidarity suggested that there were differences and divisions to be transcended, or at least temporarily shunted aside. That sense of difference between the United States and its European allies had always been there during the Cold War, but it was contained by the threat of a common enemy. The end of the Cold War brought the felt need for a reorientation of strategic thinking on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that, if anything, only sharpened differences and divisions.1
