ABSTRACT
The Treaty on the European Union (EU) stipulates that one of the key objectives of the Union is to provide citizens with a high level of safety within an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). Given that the fight against terrorism is a prominent aspect of this general objective, it is remarkable that, in spite of its political relevance and decade-long history, it has only relatively recently received due attention in the academic community.1 At the time of writing, only a handful of post-9/11 edited volumes and special issues
INTRODUCTION
The Treaty on the European Union (EU) stipulates that one of the key objectives of the Union is to provide citizens with a high level of safety within an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). Given that the fight against terrorism is a prominent aspect of this general objective, it is remarkable that, in spite of its political relevance and decade-long history, it has only relatively recently received due attention in the academic community.1 At the time of writing, only a handful of post-9/11 edited volumes and special issues
have focused on specific aspects of the EU counterterrorism efforts2 and initial monographs on the subject have only been relatively recently published by the three editors behind this special issue: Argomaniz3 has produced a theoretically informed assessment of the coherence of the EU response, Bures4 has examined the extent to which the EU can offer an added value in the fight against terrorism in Europe and Kaunert5 has studied how counterterrorism has been a driver in the process of construction of the EU’s AFSJ. Given these substantive efforts, this special issue suggests that an analysis
of the successes and failures of the EU’s involvement in this field is imperative and we believe this is a particularly pertinent moment to take stock of progress. The goal of this special issue is therefore to look back at the past decade and answer the question of whether, when it comes to the measures taken to combat terrorism following the 9/11 attacks, the EU has lived up to the promise made in its founding treaties. The editors believe that adopting this long term perspective contributes to
our understanding of the subject by permitting the individual contributors to this special issue to reveal general trends and to draw upon their accumulated expertise in order to produce a thorough assessment of the outcomes of the EU efforts to combat terrorism since 9/11. In order to ensure unity of purpose, an editorial meeting was held in November 2011 in the context of an International Workshop at the University of St Andrews that was generously funded by the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV). The result of those fruitful exchanges is this special issue: a volume that presents the views of leading experts casting a critical eye over the EU performance, recognizing achievements but also being suitably critical when realities did not match the European rhetoric. Although ‘counterterrorism’ is not yet a clearly defined area in its broadest
protection of critical infrastructure, the development of external action, the production of counter-terrorism legislation, the control of European borders and the fight against terrorist recruitment and financing. As a general rule, all articles in this special issue have attempted to determine the extent to which the EU has put in practice its own policy plans since 9/11, all articles discuss the political and institutional factors behind successes and failures and, when needed, present lessons learned and forward-looking recommendations. To complement these efforts, several contributions have also followed a thematic approach to matters such as the evolving importance of institutional actors for EU counter-terrorism, the impact of these policies on national systems and the centrality accorded to intelligence efforts in the European response. Thus, although the conceptual approaches have varied between the contributing experts, the general goal has remained to provide an indication of how EU counterterrorism relates back to the changing nature of the phenomenon of terrorism. What this special issue has not attempted to achieve, however, is an
evaluation of the effectiveness of these policies. Although the editors raised this issue at the editorial meeting, it soon became obvious that quantifying effectiveness of counter-terrorism strategies is beyond the reach of this project. There have been few attempts at providing evaluations of counterterrorism interventions at the national level and even fewer methodologically ambitious ones.6 This can be explained, amongst other factors, by the absence of sufficient evidence to measure impact due to the unavailability of sensitive data, as well as by the lack of consensus on how ‘effectiveness’ should be gauged.7 This is due to the methodological difficulties of finding the right proxy indicators that would complement the few available, yet inherently limited quantifiable criteria (such as the number of arrests, requests for assistance, or amounts of frozen terrorist money) that do not shed much light on the actual effects of counterterrorism measures on specific cultures, groups and individuals – as virtually all contributions in this special issue confirm, even the most ‘efficient’ counterterrorism measures increasing the overall security may be problematic due to their impact on other 6See: Richard J. Chasdi,Counterterror Offensives for the GhostWarWorld: The Rudiments of Counterterrorism Policy (Plymouth: Lexington Books 2010); Cynthia Lum and Leslie W. Kennedy (eds.), Evidence-based Counter-terrorism Policy (Heidelberg: Springer 2012); Gary La Free, Laura Dugan and Raven Korte, ‘The Impact of British Counter-terrorist Strategies on Political Violence in Northern Ireland: Comparing Deterrence and Backlash models’, Criminology 47/1 (2009) pp.17-45; Gary La Free et al., Modeling the Effectiveness of Counter-Terrorism Strategies in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand (University of Maryland: START Research Report 2011); Laura Dugan and Erica Chenoweth, ‘Moving Beyond Deterrence: The Effectiveness of Raising the Expected Utility of Abstaining from Terrorism in Israel’, American Sociological Review 77/4 (2012) pp.597-624. 7See: Cynthia Lum, Leslie W. Kennedy and Alison Sherley, ‘Are Counter-Terrorism Strategies Effective? The Results of the Campbell Systematic Review on Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Research’, Journal of Experimental Criminology 2 (2006) pp.489-516; Peter S. Probst, Measuring Success in Countering Terrorism: Problems and Pitfalls, in Paul B. Kantor et al. pp.316-21.
