Europe’s Expanding Security State
Ethnographic research aside, it’s not often that criminologists (at least those in the privileged Global North/West) get to experience the receiving end of the policies they are critiquing. As the title of the book suggests, however, the counter-terrorism net is being cast increasingly widely, covering the ‘friends of my enemy’ and, through enhanced security measures, everyone (Lennon and Walker, 2016). And so, while conducting the research for this book in Poland, I found myself the source of some commotion as the train we were travelling on stopped suddenly mid-route. The issue, I soon discovered, was that my bag had in fact been placed in an interconnecting carriage on account of it being too large for the overhead lockers, prompting an officious conductor to call the police to investigate. Luckily a passport contained in the front pocket had prevented the baggage from being destroyed and, having been quizzed by the Polish police as to my identity, I was allowed to return red-faced to the rest of the passengers. What is interesting about this incident—aside from the fact that I should probably travel lighter!—is the hyper-sensitivity of the authorities to terrorist threats in a country with little history of terrorist attacks, and barely any jihadist terrorism. In the course of the research for our Polish trip we found no news reports of any recent terrorist incidents—bar a frustrated (non-jihadist) attack on the Polish Parliament in 2012—and, in its 2016 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report, Europol reported only 4 arrests of jihadist terrorists in Poland, compared to 377 in France or 40 in Italy. Despite these low threat levels Poland had introduced at the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016 a welter of legislation enhancing police and surveillance powers in an ostensible effort to combat terrorism. The effect, as one respected member of the Polish judiciary told Amnesty International (2017: 19), is ‘more than just taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It appears to be an intentional, deliberate act, arming the executive with powerful tools to fight, for instance, those who hold differing views.’
Yet Poland is not alone. The opening paragraphs of the same report, with its bird’s eye view of counter-terrorist legislation in Europe since 2015, are stark in their message:
Individual EU states and regional bodies have responded to the attacks by proposing, adopting and implementing wave after wave of counter-terrorism measures that have eroded the rule of law, enhanced executive powers, peeled away judicial controls, restricted freedom of expression and exposed everyone to government surveillance. Brick by brick, the edifice of rights protection that was so carefully constructed after the Second World War is being dismantled. (Amnesty International, 2017: 6)
Overreach is also the by-word (and indeed title) of the 2017 Human Rights Watch World Report (2017). For them, the recent spate of sweeping counter-terrorism measures worldwide continues to ‘invite overreach’, with too many countries dispensing with judicial review and other critical checks against abuse. Given the febrile state of European politics and the rise of far-right nationalist parties, counter-terrorist legislation, often at the behest of international organisations such as the UN Security Council or European Union, has provided abundant opportunities for authoritarian states to pass their repression off as ‘counter-terrorism’ (Gearty, 2017: 428). The abuse of this legislation to prosecute migrants in jurisdictions such as Hungary, where sentences of ten years have been handed down for acts of ‘terror’, is a case in point.1
The publication of a study on contagion and the impact of counter-terrorism legislation on the justice system more broadly therefore appears particularly timely. There is little doubt that the spate of terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Belgium and the UK in recent years, and the legislation which has followed, has rendered the topic of contagion particularly salient for criminologists. The motivation for the research, however, stemmed from longer-held concerns about the impact of counter-terrorism on the direction of travel of the criminal justice system more broadly, particularly a perceived lacuna in the criminological literature concerning the influence of counter-terrorism on European crime control policy (Hamilton, 2018). While legislative and executive responses to terrorism in the US were often held up as archetypical examples of the extremes of ‘punitive populism’ (Bottoms, 1995), lesser appreciated perhaps was the impact of permanent, and expansive, counter-terrorism law and policy on the penal trajectory of the European Union (EU) (though see Murphy, 2012; Galli, 2015). In their book on Europe and punitiveness, for example, Dumortier et al. (2012: 110) observed that post-9/11 counter-terrorism measures had acted as a ‘turbo’ to the penalisation engine in Europe, resulting in a significant escalation of the punitive climate in Europe. Baker (2010: 206) similarly, in an in-depth review, had identified various drives towards securitisation within the European Union as placing Europe somewhere ‘on the brink’ of American-style punitiveness (see also Hosein, 2005 on privacy rights in Europe). Such conclusions point to the need for a detailed empirical (and theoretically informed) exploration of the impact of counter-terrorism measures on the penal trajectories of EU countries.
It is against this context that the research presented in this book aims to present an analysis of the impact of counter-terrorism measures on the criminal justice systems of three selected EU countries with varying histories and experience of terrorism, namely, the UK, France and Poland. The aim is to, first of all, map and evaluate the extent to which a process of ‘contagion’ has occurred from the counter-terrorism to the ‘ordinary’ criminal justice spheres. In particular, the book explores the synergistic relationship between counter-terrorism measures and control measures aimed at ‘ordinary’ crimes. It probes the hegemonic power of terrorism and the securitisation agenda more generally and, in the final chapters, discusses the implications for criminology as a discipline—does it, for example, have a role in the social contestation of contagion? Secondly, the research asks questions about the extent to which we can talk about a consensus or cohesion among the three Member States in terms of their approach to counter-terrorism. If so, is this driven by European Union-level initiatives or the Member States themselves? To what degree are these contagion effects mediated by Member State penal culture and history/experience of terrorism?
The ‘Contagion Thesis’
Many different labels have been applied to describe the ‘contagion’ phenomenon, among them normalisation (Kilcommins and Vaughan, 2004), creep (Appleby and Williams, 2010), contamination (Fenwick and Phillipson, 2011) and transplantation (Donohue, 2012). ‘Contagion’, however, appeared to u...