Security Challenges in the Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus
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Security Challenges in the Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus

Nord Stream-2 Pipeline and Russia

Musa Khan Jalalzai, Musa Khan Jalalzai

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eBook - ePub

Security Challenges in the Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus

Nord Stream-2 Pipeline and Russia

Musa Khan Jalalzai, Musa Khan Jalalzai

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About This Book

There are different perceptions in the west about Russian interference in the EU; some states see Russia as a friendly partner, and some view it as a hostile power, but, majority of states want to maintain friendly relations with Russia. These factors matter, and the relations with and perceptions of Russia certainly differ between various countries.It is noted that the US and NATO presence in Eastern Europe was a bigger challenge to the national security of Russian Federation, and that the US wanted to pressure Germany to undermine the Nord Stream-2 pipeline project. The construction of the controversial natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 has been delayed for months and completion is increasingly at risk after the US imposed sanctions on involved companies and threatened further steps. The pipeline under the Baltic Sea has been the subject of heated debate for years.The book focuses on the Security Challenges faced by the Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus.

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Year
2021
ISBN
9789390439478
Chapter 1
A Decade of EU Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence: A Critical Assessment
Javier Argomaniz, Oldrich Bures, Christian Kaunert
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 and fullest sense, it already spans across a number of other policy areas across all of the EU’s former three pillars. Thus, right from the start, the consensus was to adopt a broadly sectoral approach for this interim evaluation, independently examining policy outputs from some of the main components of the European Union’s multifaceted fight against terrorism.
These include the exchange of information between police and intelligence agencies, the 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 important values such as liberty and justice. An additional and EU-specific obstacle is the multilevel system of governance involving national, sub-national and supranational actors, which complicates attempts of tracing back the origin of specific outcomes to certain policies and/or actors.
The high density of factors affecting the incidence of terrorist violence and the difficulty in isolating the short and long term impact of individual variables has clear implications for counter-terrorism, both at the domestic and international level. It undermines the capacity that national and supranational actors have in other public policy arenas to deliver evidence based policies that are sustained by meaningful cost-effectiveness analyses and whose overall impact and implications can be measured in a thorough and credible manner. In other words, not having clear indicators of the extent to which a counter-terror initiative works – or does not – towards a specific goal affects whether counter-terror actors allocate their resources in a sensible manner.
The repercussions deriving from these limitations are evident in ‘real-life’ counter-terrorism: from existing scepticism on the value of European governments’ counter-radicalization efforts8 to the debates on whether the effect of the targeted killing of jihadists by US drone campaigns are more than counterbalanced by their impact on anti-American feelings in the region and the increase in domestic opposition due to their corrosive effect on human rights and international and US law.9 Finally, it is also important to note that with the exception of the EU’s Counterterrorism Coordinator, none of the EU agencies and institutions discussed in this volume has a counterterrorism-only mandate. Similarly, many of the legal instruments utilized in the fight against terrorism are general anti-crime measures. Thus, following Mark Rhinard, Arjen Boin and Magnus Ekengren, we believe that it is important to keep in mind that there are actually three levels of abstraction of EU’s counterterrorism capacities:
1. Capacities explicitly engineered toward the fight against terrorism;
2. Capacities directed toward managing complex threats and natural disasters in general;
3. Capacities found in EU institutions that may help national agencies, of any type, respond to adverse events.10 This further complicates all scholarly attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of EU policies in the area of counterterrorism: ‘It is hard to predict how the EU can and will employ the tools explicitly designed for counterterrorism purposes, it is impossible to foresee if and how the Union will employ its generic tools that were originally designed for other purposes’.11 Taking all of the aforementioned caveats and reservations into account, we decided that rather than to focus just on effectiveness, which the contributors to this special issue address in those areas where the aforementioned problems could be reasonably tackled (e.g. in the fight against terrorist financing, where at least some relevant data is publicly available), our primary criterion of progress is presence: the materialization and development of EU policies and their translation into national systems and the establishment of institutional actors with the necessary powers and resources to fulfil the objectives laid out in the official EU strategy documents.
In other words, the objective is to look at the existence of policies at the EU level and then, when possible, to reach a conclusion based on available evidence on whether these initiatives have had – or had the future potential to – make a difference on the ground. The distinction between presence and effectiveness is clear when seen in the context of the process of bureaucratic development that has occurred in this area. Clearly, there has been a dramatic growth in the past decade on the number of EU bodies engaged in counter-terrorism at different levels. Individual contributions have richly illustrated this point. For instance, Occhipinti has outlined Europol’s growing competencies and resources in the post-9/11 environment and their working relationship with Eurojust and Frontex. Bures has examined the role of committees such as the EU Clearing House in channelling the EU’s fight against terrorism financing. Argomaniz has listed a long list of bureaucratic actors (i.e. ENISA, CIWIN, AVSEC, MARSEC and others) that are working on protecting critical infrastructures from man-made attacks.
Bakker has examined the work of the European Network of Experts on Radicalisation (ENER) when critically analysing the EU’s approach. Kaunert, Leonard and McKenzie have concentrated on the European Parliament’s role whereas Monar has referred to the work of the EU Counter-terror Coordinator and closely examined the myriad of Council committees working on the external dimension of the threat. In parallel, den Boer has looked at Sitcen/Intcen when producing a fine-grained analysis of the transparency and accountability challenges associated with the sharing of intelligence at the European level. This is of course far from a complete list. So clearly the EU has succeeded – mainly, but by no means only – through this process of bureaucratic development to achieve recognition and visibility. Yet we take great pains to separate in our argument prominence from impact and sustain the point that the mushrooming of relevant actors at the European level should not be assumed uncritically as having in principle a direct and substantial contribution to a stronger counter-terror response in practice.
This is not only because new counterterrorism initiatives keep mushrooming while the existing arrangements continue to flourish albeit many of the formal EU agencies suffer from an output deficit. More importantly, several findings of the articles in this special issue challenge the view that a more crowded map of EU counterterrorism arrangements is axiomatically the way forward when it comes to addressing the contemporary terrorist threats in Europe. As long as it is uncertain whether extra layers of communication systems, databases and practitioners’ meetings at the European level are really the recipe to superior results, it seems reasonable to argue that more does not necessarily always mean better when it comes to fighting terrorism in Europe. Overall, we believe that by following this approach the special issue offers a more nuanced view of the EU counterterrorism policy than those currently presented by its enthusiastic supporters and its unyielding critics.
The Post-9/11 Significance of the EU as a Counter-Terrorism Actor
The consensus view in this volume is that the European Union has accomplished a surprising amount in the past decade. From a position of almost total irrelevance, and as a reaction to the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and London, the European Union has become increasingly active in the field of counter-terrorism. Using a set of policy programmes, strategy documents and list of priorities as foundations, the European Union has aimed to coordinate member states’ policies, to harmonize national legislation and even to support some operational work conducted by national authorities. In this respect the ambitions and number of EU policy framework documents in the post-9/11 environment look impressive on paper.
Already in November 2001, the European Council adopted an Action Plan on Combating Terrorism and an EU Counterterrorism Strategy was agreed in December 2005, following the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London. The general Strategy was soon complemented by others on radicalization and recruitment into terrorism and terrorist financing. In December 2003, the European Council also adopted a European Security Strategy, where terrorism heads the list of threats facing the Member States and which proclaims that concerted European action against terrorism is ‘indispensable’, a call that was renewed in its 2008 update. Terrorism is also a key element in the 2010 Internal Security Strategy.
It is no surprise that in a 2010 European Commission stocktaking exercise on EU measures specifically aimed at fighting terrorism, a conservative estimate would put the number of initiatives spanning across all of the EU’s former three pillars to more than 80.12 The above successes have been trumpeted by EU institutions themselves. According to Max-Peter Ratzel, the former Director of Europol: ‘The abortive London attacks of August 2006 ... showed that the concerted EU actions and counterterrorism policies proved to be effective when put to the test. This is some most recent success of EU counterterrorism efforts but a number of other terrorist cells have been dismantled throughout the EU and terrorist plans foiled as a direct result of the concerted EU actions and counterterrorism policies’.13 The first EU Counterterrorism Coordinator Gijs de Vries has gone as far as to claim that the fight against terrorism is changing ‘the role and functioning of the European Union’ as it adopts an increasingly operational character in this area.14
All this would simply be unthinkable before 9/11 when the EU was a somewhat negligible factor in these areas.15 The contributions in this special issue offer a number of explanations for the emergence of the EU as an increasingly visible and important counterterrorism player over the last decade. To begin with, many contributors attribute much of the drive for the EU’s growing involvement in counterterrorism to the shocks produced by the major terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and London. These attacks led to a change in the existing European perception of terrorism and of the instruments that the EU Member States should put in place to fight this security threat. Under this perspective, the political shock that these terrorist attacks represented led to strong public pressure for European leaders members to ‘do something’, and since the threat was publicly framed as transnational, national governments rapidly agreed on the need for coordinated European action. More specifically, Bakker notes in his contribution how the formulation of EU policies that aim to counter radicalization and recruitment have been incident driven, a direct – and sometimes inconsistent – reaction to the bombings in Madrid and London, and we affirm that this observation can be firmly generalized to the entire of the European counter-terror response.
Furthermore, as Monar points out in his contribution, the transformation of the initial external crisis (the 9/11 attacks in the USA) into sustained European action has undoubtedly been facilitated by internal and EU-specific enabling factors that have paved the way for the emergence of EU actorness in the fight against terrorism: the Lisbon treaty reforms that have empowered the Union in terms of competences and instruments (i.e. to sign agreements on terrorism with other third countries), the development of internal institutional and legal capabilities (such as Europol, Eurojust, the Counter Terror Coordination and others) and the emergence of a threat perception generating sufficient political will for common action.
Although there are diverging views amongst the contributors about whether this threat perception is truly European, due to the fact that only some European countries have suffered from sustained terrorist campaigns within their borders, there is a general agreement on the view that, at least in the EU discourse, terrorism has been internalized as a ‘European threat’. This has allowed the EU to present a common discourse that has sustained political consensus and, to a degree, unity of action, despite this action being often concocted by only a small group of countries within the Union. In sum, as Monar observed, ‘threat perceptions and international collective action needs after the 9/11 attacks have presented the EU with an “opportunity” to assume new roles and responsibilities in a field in which it had before legally none and practically hardly any’.
Other contributors to this special issue have highlighted that some internal enabling factors are a by-product of the single market. Occhipinti, for example, shows how the freedom of movement by citizens and capital greatly facilitated the setting up of cross-border terrorist operations whilst allowing these networks to take advantage of differences in national anti-terrorism laws and capabilities and existing gaps in international police and judicial cooperation. As a result, these developments have encouraged calls for increased national coordination and for the establishment of EU flanking measures. A number of contributions also revealed that encouragement for a more proactive EU role in counterterrorism has come from external actors. Bures for instance shows how the smart sanctions and the anti-money laundering approaches to counter terrorist financing adopted by the Union were in fact standards originally drafted by other international bodies such as the FATF. Likewise, Argomaniz has stressed the importance of the ICAO and IMO guidelines for the EU transport security policies.
Finally, the importance of external pressure by the United States on the EU and the extent and ambition of the transatlantic security relationship has merited much attention in Monar’s and Kaunert, Leonard and Mackenzie’s papers. At the same time, this special issue confirms that most of the Union’s contribution to the fight against terrorism has been conducted within the borders of Europe. ...

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