The EU and Counter-Terrorism

Politics, Polity and Policies after 9/11

Javier Argomaniz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780415724067
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135169480
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a theoretically informed analysis of how coherently the European Union fights terrorism in the post-9/11 era.

Few studies have looked at how the European Union has transformed into a relevant international anti-terrorist actor. Yet, 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. It has acted to coordinate member states' policies, to harmonise national legislation, and even to support operational work conducted by national authorities. The EU's reaction to the threat of transnational terrorism has been complex and multidimensional, ranging from the exchange of information between police and intelligence agencies to judicial cooperation, and from infrastructure protection to the fight against terrorist recruitment and financing. This book offers a comprehensive empirical account of the polity, policy and politics of EU counter-terrorism, based on an analysis of academic literature, official documents, and about fifty interviews with policy-makers, experts and practitioners carried out at EU institutions (i.e. Commission, Council, Eurojust, Europol), Permanent Representations of the EU Member States and national capitals.

This book will be of much interest to students of counter-terrorism, EU politics, security studies and IR in general.

1 Introduction

As a reaction to the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and London, the European Union (EU) has become increasingly active in the field of counter-terrorism. It has acted to coordinate member states’ policies, to harmonise national legislation and even to support operational work conducted by national authorities. The Union’s response to the threat of transnational terrorism has been complex and multidimensional, ranging from the exchange of information between police and intelligence agencies to judicial cooperation and from infrastructure protection to the fight against terrorist recruitment and financing. The growing importance of joint EU policies in counter-terrorism merits a comparable increase in academic interest. This book aims precisely to contribute towards this purpose by offering a comprehensive account of the post-9/11 EU response to transnational terrorism.

An enduring debate pervading research on European Union counter-terrorism since 9/11 has been devoted to the extent to which the European response has developed in an efficient, proportionate and holistic manner. Contributions to this question have centred on the problem-solving capacity of the Union’s institutional framework and ‘the process of advocating, formulating, deciding and implementing policies’.¹ Since matters of consistency have significant implications for the effectiveness and credibility of the Union as a counter-terror actor and the output legitimacy of its policies, it is noticeable that these issues have yet to receive the attention they clearly merit.

Most EU literature on the question of consistency has so far circumscribed to a lively debate in the foreign policy arena regarding the challenges to policy coherence emerging from the development of an increasingly complex institutional structure.² It must be emphasised, however, that coherence is a central aspect in any EU cross-pillar policy space.³ It is in those areas where achieving ‘co-ordinated activities with the objective of ensuring that the Union speaks with a “single voice” ’⁴ becomes a goal and a challenge, due to the need to close the gap between the intergovernmental and communitarised decision-making procedures. Counter-terrorism, with its implicit cross-sectoral pressures, constitutes a highly relevant case study.

It is the aim of this work to investigate the question of consistency in the field of counter-terrorism by including in the analysis the interrelationship between this question and the process of institutionalisation of this policy space. To do so it has put into practice a qualitative methodology based on the triangulation of interviews, policy documents and secondary literature. The study of official EU documents has been complemented with documentary analysis of news articles, academic papers, think-tank policy documents, national parliamentary reports and non-government organisation (NGO) publications. Information from the official documents has been supplemented with more than 40 face-to-face semi-structured interviews with European and national authorities’ officials, policy-makers and practitioners. Interviewees belonged to a wide variety of managerial levels, from desk officers to Directorate General (DG) directors, resulting in a diverse sample that included career politicians, civil servants and public administrators. These served to provide in-depth input on informal coordination processes, the functioning of formal structures, the impact of institutional changes and other relevant matters. As importantly, they gave the author the opportunity to hear in the actors’ own voice rather than in the terminology of the organisation about the obstacles and problems to cooperation that exist within the EU’s institutional framework and between the EU and national authorities. Individual interviews have been crucial in order to get beyond the rhetoric that pervaded the official communications on this issue.

Data gathered in this way has served to produce a rigorous examination of the emergence of counter-terrorism as a policy domain in the aftermath of 9/11, delineate the resulting institutional framework and policy response, and investigate the extent to which these are coherent. Hence the analytical time frame goes from the reaction to the 9/11 attacks to the immediate aftermath of the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty and the new Stockholm Programme for the area of Freedom, Security and Justice (FSJ). These time boundaries are far from arbitrary; on the contrary, it is argued here that the institutional changes from Lisbon coincide with the conclusion of the institutionalisation process and the opening of a new stage. The fluidity and change of the five years that followed 9/11 have progressively morphed into a solidified, stable policy domain. Whereas Lisbon and Stockholm have shaped some constituent elements in EU counter-terrorism, the broad contours of the field can be claimed to have been clearly drawn well before. As such, I argue here that EU counter-terrorism currently suffers from serious consistency weaknesses and some of these shortcomings have their roots in the political processes that shaped the preceding stage of institutionalisation of the policy domain.

This conclusion will be reached with the use of a new institutionalist theoretical perspective.⁵ Such choice is firmly based on the belief shared with Ekengren et al. that ‘without understanding the unique structure of European governance, divided between national and supranational competences, assessment of the EU’s role [in a domain] would probably lack accuracy and nuance.’⁶ New institutionalist approaches are especially effective in explaining how specific policy domains follow certain organisational patterns, why and how the EU gain new roles, and how institutional settings shaped by political choices affect policy outcomes. All these processes are central concerns for this study.

Background: pre-9/11 European cooperation in counter-terrorism

Before embarking on the investigation of these issues, it must be first emphasised that the questions addressed by this research have only relatively recently become relevant. This is for two main reasons: first, European terrorism is an issue that has traditionally been – and continues to be – analysed principally through national lenses; second, whenever international cooperation occurred at the European level, the Union was hardly the first port of call for cooperation. Only after 2001 has the Union become a significant counter-terror actor and the relatively ‘recentness’ of this matter poses both challenges and opportunities for the researcher.

In this respect, pre-9/11 research on European terrorism traditionally concentrated on individual European states and the challenges they faced from endogenous separatist or revolutionary groups. The more modest, in fact rather scarce, output produced on European counter-terrorism tended to emphasise the serious impediments toward collaboration in this area. Structural obstacles for cooperation, although never meriting particular and extensive analysis per se, periodically surfaced in the academic studies of that period. Anderson, Chalk and Reinares are some of the authors who have put forward explanations to account for this situation.⁷

The most commonly mentioned is the fact that European countries have generally had very different experiences with the phenomenon of terrorism. Spain and the United Kingdom have suffered an almost continuous onslaught of terrorist violence since the 1970s up until very recently, mainly from separatist terrorist groups such as the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland. Leftist revolutionary groups such as Brigate Rosse in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof in Germany, Action Directe in France or 17 November in Greece caused considerable civil unrest during the 1970s although most of these terrorist organisations had all but disappeared by the end of the 1980s. In the 1990s France was the first European country to experience a sustained campaign of fundamentalist terrorism, conducted by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) to punish French support for the Algerian government. So whereas countries such as Spain or the UK have experienced a large number of terrorist attacks in the last three decades, others have suffered this problem more sporadically (i.e. Germany or Italy), and some European countries have had very few or, as in Finland, are yet to register a significant terrorist atrocity within its territory. The absence of a uniform level of terrorism danger made it unlikely that a particular government would find a similar level of support and commitment from their European neighbours. Even when political will existed, only a handful of European states, the largest and also generally those most affected by the threat, possessed the resources, experience and ‘know how’ necessary to contribute significantly to cooperation in this area. As will be demonstrated later in this volume, this truism has not ceased to be a significant factor affecting cooperation.

Importantly, the domestic origin of most pre-9/11 terrorism in Europe also meant that international cooperation was not a crucial tool to tackle the threat. During this period terrorist activity tended to be bound up with the idiosyncrasies of the particular European state, its colonial past or institutional organisation, resulting in action being directed towards influencing a single government’s policies. Even revolutionary terrorist groups that shared an ideology of global liberation from the capitalist ‘exploitative’ regime focused their activities almost entirely in their countries of origin. Consequently, terrorism was generally considered by European governments as an internal security problem.

This lack of a common source of threat did not help to generate a coherent multilateral approach towards this problem. States tended to develop their own strategies, which were sometimes incompatible. Those European countries affected by significant levels of domestic terrorism were also less likely to prioritise ‘international terrorism’ over their own domestic problem, particularly when these groups had separate goals than those acting within the state. The accommodating view and willingness to negotiate with Middle Eastern terrorists espoused by countries such as France and Germany during the 1970s and 1980s was often seen as a more convenient immediate solution to the problem than a more taxing long-term drive to improve joint action against groups as Hizbollah or the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

This detracted from a commonly accepted legal approach towards this phenomenon, compounded by the diversity and variety of European counter-terrorist agencies and judicial systems. Legal traditions, court procedures and penalties varied widely amongst states. In fact, before the 9/11 events only six European states had specialised anti-terrorist legislations.⁸ This study’s examination of the progress in European judicial cooperation in counter-terrorism is matched up to this previous context.

Policing structures and practices also differed significantly. Policing in France, Spain and Italy, for instance, is organised along national lines but in Germany and the UK police forces are locally recruited and accountable. Whereas in states like Germany the dividing line between state security service and police is very clear, in other countries, such as the UK, it is considerably less so.⁹ This lack of homogeneity made international cooperation problematic, particularly in the field of personal data or intelligence exchange, where security services, always anxious to protect their sources, are reluctant to share. Notwithstanding the advances in the last few years, it will be argued here that the problem of trust is still prevalent in this area.

With these obstacles in mind, European governments have tended to cooperate in counter-terrorism only when all countries involved were directly or indirectly affected by the actions of one particular terrorist group. Indeed most cooperation was pragmatic, ad hoc and bilateral, such as the Spanish and French collaboration against ETA and the British–Irish action against the IRA.

With these antecedents, it is therefore not a surprise to find that a European policy on terrorism took a long time to develop. Undoubtedly the heightened terrorist activity in the 1970s served as a catalyst. Collaboration between indigenous groups (i.e. IRA and ETA), international terrorist action in Europe (Middle Eastern terrorism in particular) and the connections between endogenous and international groups (i.e. Baader-Meinhof and Palestinian terrorists) signalled the failure of governments in Western Europe to defeat the terrorist threat in their own countries.¹⁰ Consistent with the post-9/11 response, the fact that some elements of the terrorist threat stemmed from groups originating from outside their national borders further persuaded governments of the limitations of unilateral action.

Initially the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism aimed to address the threat by enhancing the coordination between national judiciaries to prevent Europe being a terrorist sanctuary. Yet, as limits to mutual confidence continued to exist, the Council of Europe Convention had little practical impact on European extradition practices and it came to be regarded as a failure. Anderson has highlighted that many signatories took advantage of Article 13, which allowed states to refuse requests for extradition on the grounds that the offence committed was of a political nature.¹¹ The 1979 Dublin Agreement had the same objective but never received sufficient ratifications to permit its entry into force, providing further evidence of European governments’ uneasy balance between a need for furthering cooperation in this area and their reluctance to sign accords that impinged on sensitive areas of their sovereignty. This paradox remains relevant today.

On the other hand, as Vercher noted, the two agreements were also a reflection of a shift of attitudes in European governments, increasingly disappointed by the lack of action at the UN level, towards a more regionally confined, Eurocentric approach.¹²

For these reasons, authors tend to regard the establishment in June 1976 of the TREVI intergovernmental forum as the foundation of counter-terror cooperation at the European level. TREVI (Terrorisme, Radicalisme, Extrémisme et Violence Internationale) was established to serve as a meeting place for Interior Ministers of EC states and other non-EC countries to exchange information on terrorist organisations, equipment and training and anti-terrorist tactics. Starting as a multi-level intergovernmental forum, in the next sixteen years it slowly evolved into a policy-making network and a secure communications system between member states’ police forces, as Politi has illustrated.¹³

Guyomarch has praised TREVI as a very effective multilateral framework for the sharing of best practices and experience, the exchange of intelligence and the facilitation of personal trust between individual police and intelligence officers.¹⁴ Yet TREVI was not without its faults. Monar stressed the lack of a central secretariat with an ‘institutional memory’, a stable institutional framework, a substantive legal basis and/or a centralised database for information, all of which severely limited the strength and nature of cooperation.¹⁵ These shortcomings resulted in an inherent difficulty to set up overall coordinated strategies, shared strategic analyses and common assessments of the problem. Without these elements, Benyon and other critics have stressed how TREVI remained ‘just’ a model of informal cooperation and recommendation with no implementation powers.¹⁶ Moreover, Chalk highlighted that the political sensitivity of the information limited the range of data that could be disseminated, and inhibited total frankness on certain subjects.¹⁷ A similar problem affected the Police Working Group in Terrorism, set up in 1983 separately from TREVI, and charged with the goal to promote working relationships between European agencies combating terrorism.

These weaknesses paved the way for the ‘EU-isation’ of internal security cooperation through the more structured intergovernmental working structures delivered by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the origin of the pillar structure of the European Union. Henceforth intergovernmental cooperation on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), established by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Post-9/11 institutionalisation of European Union counter-terrorism
• 3. The institutional framework of EU counter-terrorism
• 4. Institutional consistency
• 5. The policy dimension of EU counter-terrorism
• 6. Horizontal consistency
• 7. Vertical consistency
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index