Conspicuous by their absence? The member states in European Union counter-terrorism

ABSTRACT

This article investigates member state influence on the making of EU counter-terrorism policy. Crucially, member states have not been viewed as major drivers of change in EU counter-terrorism, despite their experience of attacks, policy expertise, and the domestic salience of the issue. To address this gap, I show how member states acted as policy entrepreneurs during EU Passenger Name Records (EU-PNR), on which final agreement was reached in 2016. Specifically, I demonstrate that the UK Home Office was a prominent, long-term actor in the development of the EU’s counter-terrorism policy and worked with the Commission to build an alliance in favour of EU-PNR. However, it was only with the ‘window of opportunity’ presented by jihadi terrorist attacks between 2015 and 2016 that members of the French government were finally able to pressure critical elements of the European Parliament into agreement.

KEYWORDS:

• European integration
• terrorism and counter-terrorism
• human rights and civil liberties
• multiple streams framework
• member states

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. Also, Birte Gippert kindly read and offered advice on different drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. PNR are data, such as name, booking information, and travel itinerary, submitted to airlines by passengers when booking a flight. Today, many states gather the PNR data of passengers for security, with these being sent to responsible authorities by airlines, usually before a flight.

2. These included using PNR data for migration control; data being held for 6 years, three on an active database and three archived; and use for ‘intelligence-based targeting of individuals against patterns of behaviour’ or what could be described as ‘profiling’ (Council of the European Union 2011; The Guardian 2011).

3. Ripoll Servent (2015, 80–81) demonstrates how Charles Clarke, then UK Home Secretary, was influential in convincing the European Parliament to support the Data Retention Directive in late 2005. Baker-Beall and Mott (2021, 711) show how the EU Counter-Terrorism Strategy was ‘modelled on’ the UK’s.

4. The Pilot complaint system is a mechanism by which EU citizens can report improper application of EU law by member states to the Commission.

5. The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs Committee.

6. The European People’s Party (EPP) and ECR mostly supported EU-PNR throughout the policy process.

7. Luxembourg held the EU Presidency in the second half of 2015, and the Netherlands took over in the first half of 2016.

8. This attack was linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.