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ABSTRACT
The responses of states to terrorism depend crucially on the perception and definition of the challenge by their respective governments. Two decades after the 9/11 attacks it has become normal for EU institutions to publicly assert a similar challenge/response logic. However, with EU Member States still primarily targeted by terrorists, retaining primary competence for protecting their citizens against security threats and disposing exclusively of all operational means it is worthwhile to ask whether this challenge/response logic is actually applicable to the to the EU as such rather than only to its Member States. This article explores, first, whether and in which respects terrorism can be regarded as a threat to the EU as such and, second, to what extent the EU as such has been able to develop counter-terrorism capabilities and action in response to this threat, concluding with an overall assessment of the EU as a counter-terrorism actor.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Regulation (EU) 2016/399 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 March 2016 on a Union Code on the rules governing the movement of persons across borders (Schengen Borders Code).
2 See the “Conclusions” of the extraordinary European Council meeting of 21 September 2001 (European Council, Citation2001) are a primary example. They also defined terrorism – rather philosophically - as “a challenge to the conscience of every human being”.
3 On the specific FTF challenges to the EU see Bures (Citation2020), and on the phenomenon more generally the comprehensive recent analysis by Pokalova (Citation2020).
4 Far from perfect, firstly, because CFFTA numbers obviously do not say anything about the severity of the attacks counted, and secondly because TESAT numbers are based on reporting by the Member States whose classification practices, for instance as regards the classification of an attack as “foiled”, are not necessarily identical. The figures provided to Europol by the Member States often also leave a margin of interpretation. For 2019, for instance, 56 of the CFFTAs reported by the United Kingdom were declared to be “security-related incidents in Northern Ireland” (Europol, Citation2020a, Citation2020b, p. 84).
5 Own compilation of figures taken from the 2016–2020 Europol TESAT Reports available at https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-reports/eu-terrorism-situation-and-trend-report#fndtn-tabs-0-bottom-2.
6 Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
7 Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia.
8 Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta.
9 A fact which has even been in a sense “judicially” confirmed by the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in its 2009 judgement on the Treaty of Lisbon in which the Court underlined that in spite of “the great successes of European integration […] it cannot be overlooked, however, that the public perception of factual issues and of political leaders remains connected to a considerable extent to patterns of identification related to the nation-state, language, history and culture” (Bundesverfassungsgericht, Citation2009, paragraph 251).
10 “Essentially” in the sense of the AFSJ provisions covering all internal aspect of counter-terrorism, with only some international aspects (relating to third countries and international organisations) falling within the remit of the Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (Hillion, Citation2014).
11 In the fields of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters initiatives can also be introduced by a quarter of the Member States.
12 According to Article 6 of 2016 Europol Regulation (EU) 2016/794 Europol can well request authorities of Member States via national coordination units to initiate, conduct or coordinate an investigation, but those can still decide “not to accede” to those. Similarly, Article 4 of the 2018 Eurojust Regulation (EU) 2018/1727 provides for the possibility of Eurojust to address certain prosecution- or investigation-related requests to national authorities but this are still explicitly entitled to “refuse” them.
13 These benefit from an often substantial input by the EU’s Intelligence and Situation Centre (EU INTCEN) which is part of the CFSP framework.
14 Recently reconfirmed by Article 10(q) of the 2019 Regulation (EU) 2019/1896 on the European Border and Coast Guard.
15 European Commission proposals to further ease the access of national law enforcement authorities to EURODAC (European Commission, Citation2020c) are currently under negotiation – but not uncontroversial.
16 “Rough” in the sense of it being obviously impossible in the context of this article to provide a complete analysis of the hundreds of measures and texts adopted by the EU in the counter-terrorism domain since the 9/11 attacks.
17 Such as in the case of the arrest in Belgium and surrender to France in April 2016 of one of the suspects involved in the November 2015 Paris attacks (Ministère de la Justice, Citation2016).
18 During 2020 French authorities accessed the SIS II overall 770,923,373 times compared to “only” 287,771,272 times on the German side, placing at the same time also 16,056,601 alerts in the system compared to 11,870,565 German alerts (Eu-LISA, Citation2021, p. 6 and 10).
19 For a recent example see Articles 3, 13, 20 and 23 of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement which entered into force in 2017 (OJ EU, L 161, 29.5.2014).
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Notes on contributors
Jörg Monar
Jörg Monar. PhD (Modern History) University of Munich, 1989; PhD (Political Science) European University Institute, 1991; Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, College of Europe (Bruges), 1991–1994; Director of the Institut für Europäische Politik (Bonn), 1994–1995; Professor of Politics, University of Leicester, 1995–2001; Professor of Contemporary European Studies, University of Sussex, 2001–2005; Marie Curie Chair of Excellence and director of the SECURINT-Project, University of Strasbourg, 2005–2008; Director of Studies at the College of Europe, 2008–2013, then Rector of the College, 2013–2020.