9/11 at 25: How the ‘War on Terror’ helped mainstream Europe’s far right

Senior researcher with Georgetown University’s The Bridge Initiative.

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the political order built in their aftermath continues to shape Europe. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) helped far right parties in Europe gain political prominence they had long been denied. Islamophobic narratives that shaped global policy after 2001 legitimised an anti-Muslim racism that had already been building within Europe’s far right for years.

Before September 11, far right parties in Europe had been largely marginalised within the continent’s multi-party systems. Even where some won significant electoral support, many remained politically stigmatised or excluded from power, and were better known for anti-Semitism and open nostalgia for their fascist origins than as credible contenders for government.

But the ground was already shifting before the towers fell. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the far right’s long-standing racism began to sharpen its focus on Islam specifically. Parties such as the French Front National (now the Rassemblement National) and the Austrian Freedom Party discovered Islam as their new “enemy within”: Arabs and Black communities in France became, in far-right rhetoric, simply “Muslims.” So did Turks in Austria. The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) was arguing as early as 1991 that Islam posed a threat to liberal democracy and stood in the way of immigrant “integration.” By the late 1990s, Pim Fortuyn had written a book titled Against the Islamisation of Our Culture, introducing a cruder, more overt strain of Islamophobia to Dutch politics.

Then came September 11, which handed the far right an opening it hadn’t had to build for itself.

When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people, President George W. Bush declared a ‘Global War on Terror’. The far right no longer needed to manufacture anti-Muslim sentiment on its own; political speeches, media coverage and wars waged across Muslim-majority countries did much of that work for them.

Bush insisted the fight targeted “terrorists” who had perverted the message of Islam, not Islam itself. But the rhetoric and policy that followed routinely treated all Muslims as suspects, casting the religion itself as inherently violent — a framing that helped mainstream and globalise Islamophobia over the course of the ‘War on Terror’.

Bush’s declaration that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” left European governments with little room to manoeuvre. More than 13 European countries joined the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, with British forces most directly engaged in combat. Twelve joined the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the UK and Poland took on major combat roles, while France and Germany, this time, opposed the war.