People paying tribute on Friday to victims outside the Liceu Theatre, on the site of Thursdays deadly van attack in Barcelona. Photograph: Quique Garcia/EPA

Most Europeans have rarely lived amid such peace and plenty, and take prosperity and security for granted. It is that assumption of established wellbeing that makes a terror attack the more shocking, and the fear it inspires the more contagious. This is most true on the streets of a place like Barcelona, whose ancient buildings belie its reputation asone of the youngest, liveliest and loveliest ofEuropean cities.

It is partly this international, cosmopolitan character that makes it a terrorist target: what happened here on Thursday afternoon has not only left a city in mourning. The waves of terror and grief for children, mothers, fathers, lovers and pensioners ripple out to the 34 different countries from which they came, and far beyond. After a related attack along the coast in Cambrils, holidaymakers of every nationality, faith and ethnicity will be more anxious, more fearful and less trusting.

But events in Barcelona have also provoked spontaneous demonstrations of courage and resilience. On Friday morning, only hours after the attack on Las Ramblas, people were gathering there again not just to pause for reflection and remembrance but to sing and shout their defiance.

It is too early to know the precise motivation behind this attack and quite how, or how far, its perpetrators were recruited and organised. Police say the cell planned a bombing, but accidentally detonated its stockpile of explosives. But whether it was part of their original plan or an improvisation, this has all the appearance of being another in the lengthening sequence of devastating vehicle attacks Nice, Berlin, Stockholm and London inspired, if not orchestrated, by Islamic State or similar groups. This is terrorism in the age of the internet, sometimes dependent on sophisticated tools like encrypted messaging, or grooming that might be carried out from afar, or the ability to build an explosive device; sometimes only on holding a driving licence and a recognised ID document.

Spain, like Britain and to a lesser extent France and Germany, has long experience of living with and ultimately defeating other kinds of terror ETA, the IRA and the Red Army Faction. The new generation share some attributes with the earlier groups: they believe in the propaganda value of the deed and the catharsis and symbolism of violence familiar from their forerunners. The last ETA attack was in 2006, two years after jihadis first struck, bombing four commuter trains in Madrid.

But technology enables more elusive ways of organising; it facilitates the lone actor as well as the cell. And when terrorists draw their inspiration from Islamist extremism as when, like Jo Coxs murderer Thomas Mair, they are inspired by racist rightwing ideology it poses more profound challenges to community cohesion than, say, separatist revolt. They intend to divide.

As Londoners know from recent attacks, it is impossible to defend all public space from a driver in a rental van intent on murder. The large well-placed planter or the movable barricade can only do so much against the low-tech attack. But it is even more difficult, and even more important, to defend the mutual respect for rights and freedoms by which heterogenous western societies prosper.

That means the internet giants patrolling the margins of what they host in a more coherent and consistent way. It also means that politicians who have a duty to express their countrys anger and hurt do not reach automatically for further powers for security agencies when often the bigger challenge is making sense of what they already know.

Each of the waves of terror that have disrupted European countries in the past 50 years have taken a generation or more to play out; the former head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said in a rare interview recently that he thought the fight against Isis too would take another three decades. It is widely recognised that it will never be possible to prevent every terror attack in a free society. But terror will have won if, in the fight against it, we fail to protect the sense of shared purpose and trust that bind society together.

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The Guardian view on attacks in Spain: fighting terror means protecting freedom - The Guardian