European Homeland Security

Christian Kaunert, Sarah Léonard, Patryk Pawlak, Christian Kaunert, Sarah Léonard, Patryk Pawlak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136332760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

This book examines the processes and factors shaping the development of homeland security policies in the European Union (EU), within the wider context of European integration.

The EU functions in a complex security environment, with perceived security threats from Islamist terrorists, migration and border security issues, and environmental problems. In order to deal with these, the EU has undertaken a number of actions, including the adoption of the European Security Strategy in 2003, the Information Management Strategy of 2009, and the Internal Security Strategy of 2010. However, despite such efforts to achieve a more concerted European action in the field of security, there are still many questions to be answered about whether the European approach is really a strategic one.

European Homeland Security addresses two major debates in relation to the development of homeland security in Europe. First, it reflects on the absence of 'homeland security' in European political debate and its potential consequences. Second, it examines the significant policy developments in the EU that suggest the influence of homeland security ideas, notably through policy transfer from the United States.

The book will be of great interest to students of European security and EU politics, terrorism and counter-terrorism, security studies and IR.

1 Introduction

European homeland security – a European strategy in the making?

Christian Kaunert, Sarah Léonard and Patryk Pawlak

On 7 July 2005, four young Islamist suicide-bombers attacked London’s transport system, killing 52 members of the public and injuring several hundreds more. The London bombings were the first attacks on British soil to be carried out as part of the global jihad, but had been preceded by other major terrorist attacks on the United States (US) on 11 September 2001 and on Spain on 11 March 2004. Despite setbacks, militants have continued to plan attacks, as evidenced by the 2007 suicide attack on Glasgow airport. In October 2010, warnings against terrorist attacks were issued in France, Germany and other European countries. Subsequently, a package sent from Yemen and containing a bomb device, which had been designed to go off on a US-bound aircraft, was intercepted at East Midlands Airport in the United Kingdom (UK) (BBC News 2010). As highlighted by Europol’s (2011) ‘EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report’ (TE-SAT 2011), Islamist terrorism remains a ‘high and diverse’ threat to European Union (EU) Member States (Europol 2011: 6).

In November 2010, Greece saw the arrival of a large number of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers at the Greek–Turkish border and requested EU support to strengthen its border controls. In response, Frontex, the EU External Borders Agency, coordinated the deployment of more than 150 armed border guards from a large number of EU Member States. Those border guards, who were part of so-called Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABITs), conducted 24-hour joint surveillance with their Greek colleagues at the land border with Turkey (Frontex 2010b). Italy also requested EU support in February 2011 following the arrival of about 3,000 irregular migrants and asylum-seekers on the Italian coast in the space of a few days, most of whom were heading from Tunisia. EU support mainly took the form of a joint patrolling operation in the Central Mediterranean area, called ‘Joint Operation Hermes 2011’ and coordinated by Frontex, which was designed to enhance border surveillance (Frontex 2011). Those are only two recent examples of the numerous tasks conducted by Frontex, which has proved to be one of the most dynamic of all EU agencies.

In 1999, the tanker Erika had sunk off the coast of France causing one of the greatest environmental disasters in the world (BBC News 2000). Three years later, another massive oil spill affected the coastlines of several EU Member States following the sinking of the Prestige (BBC News 2002). In 2006, heavy rain and melting snow caused significant floods in Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania (BBC News 2006), while severe fires in Greece forced thousands of people to abandon their home in 2009 (BBC News 2009). In October 2010, the Hungarian government had to declare a state of emergency after toxic sludge had leaked from an alumina factory (Guardian 2010). Thus, various natural and man-made disasters hit Europe every year calling for a concerted and effective European response.

These examples underline the complexity of the security environment in which the EU operates. In order to tackle these challenges, the EU Member States have undertaken a number of actions, including, among others, the adoption of the European Security Strategy (ESS) in 2003 (which was updated in 2008), the Information Management Strategy (IMS) for EU internal security of 2009 and the Internal Security Strategy (ISS) of 2010. However, despite these efforts aiming to achieve more concerted European action in the field of security, it is not clear to what extent the EU’s approach to these security challenges can be considered to be strategic. Indeed, can it be seen as strategic if several security aspects are addressed separately, rather than in the framework of a more general ‘homeland security’ policy? What would be the potential benefits of examining and conceptualising the EU’s security policies as part of ‘homeland security’, rather than fragmented ‘internal security’ policies? These are some of the major questions that this edited book addresses. Previous studies have tended to examine empirical developments in specific policy areas (see, for example, Kurowska and Pawlak 2009a; Wolff et al. 2009a; Kaunert and Léonard 2010), while conceptual debates have tended to focus on the nexus between internal and external security (Bigo 2000; Eriksson and Rhinard 2009; Balzacq 2009). However, it is also necessary to ask broader questions, notably about the political community that is being secured by security policies and the overall direction of the European integration process. This book puts forward the idea that using the concept of ‘homeland security’ can illuminate various EU policy developments in interesting ways, despite its cultural and political connotations, which are fully acknowledged and will be explored later.

This book puts forward three main arguments. First, it shows that, although ‘homeland security’ as a term has been largely absent from European political debates, there have been significant policy developments in the EU in recent years that suggest the influence of homeland security ideas, notably through policy transfer from the US to the EU. This also means, and this is the second argument put forward by the book, that ‘homeland security’ is an appropriate concept for analysing various policy developments in EU security in recent years, although it is not part of the EU’s security rhetoric. This book also argues that using this concept has the advantage of highlighting certain trends, which could not be identified otherwise. Finally, the third argument developed in this book is that, although homeland security ideas have implicitly underpinned EU policy developments to a significant extent in recent years, the EU Member States have not adopted any overarching strategy for European homeland security yet. On the contrary, European homeland security has seen a plethora of policy initiatives, which have led to the adoption of partially overlapping security strategies, including the European Security Strategy (ESS) and the ISS.

The emergence of ‘homeland security’ on the US political agenda

Crenshaw (2005) has argued that US policy-makers have long recognised the dangers of terrorism. After the Iran hostage crisis, President Reagan entered office with terrorism being at the top of the political agenda. President Clinton was also concerned about terrorism after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on Oklahoma City. Thus, there was general awareness of the terrorist threat in the US, but not of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda in particular (Crenshaw 2005). It all changed on 11 September 2001, which saw the worst event of modern international terrorism, with nearly 3,000 people being killed (Martin 2006; Hoffman 2006). Many commentators instantly drew a parallel with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. As a result, ‘homeland security’ gained an increasingly significant place as both a rhetorical tool and an important policy area in the US and beyond (Cameron 2007).

Its significance is confirmed by its high profile at all levels of the governmental and societal agendas. Both the private and public sectors now devote a lot of attention, as well as human and material resources, to ‘homeland security’. The Patriot Act virtually abandoned post-Cold War-era barriers between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement. Major structural and institutional changes have been undertaken at the state and local levels. In particular, the decision of President George W. Bush to create the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 was seen as ‘the most ambitious effort to recognise and expand the federal government in the area of foreign policy since 1947’ (Rosati 2004: 211). Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge was named as the first office holder. His mission was defined, in George W. Bush’s words, as to ‘lead, oversee, and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that may come’ (Relyea 2002a: 400).

According to several scholars, the idea of ‘homeland security’ is rooted in historical efforts of civil defence (Relyea 2002a, 2002b; Seiple 2002; Bullock et al. 2006). US President Bush recognised this in his address on homeland security on 8 November 2001 (cited in Relyea 2002b: 218): ‘We will ask state and local officials to create a new modern civil defense service, similar to local volunteer fire departments, to respond to local emergencies when the manpower of governments is stretching thin’. Civil defence began during the First World War, but due to the lack of a real threat of air attacks on the US, it did not develop in the US until May 1941 (Bullock et al. 2006). As the war ended, the US Administration examined the successes of British, German and Japanese civil defence. The new Office for Civil Defense Planning adopted a document entitled ‘Civil Defense for National Security’ (Relyea 2002b: 218), which served as a programme for the Cold War era. However, with the end of the Soviet Union, civil defence as a concept also became a relic in the US.

In light of these developments, Relyea (2002a: 397) critically observes that ‘homeland security’ may be a substitute for the Cold War-weary ‘national security’ concept, ‘devoid of its intellectual development, but prone to the same use as a justification for the exercise of prerogative powers in ways harmful to constitutional arrangements of government and guaranteed citizens’ rights’. He suggests that some might regard this concept as being unpleasantly linked to past nationalist invocations of the ‘fatherland’ or the ‘motherland’, and therefore possibly reminiscent of national leaders pursuing cultural or racial purity, such as Hitler or Stalin. This is emphatically not the understanding of ‘homeland security’ underpinning this book, which emphasises that importing ‘homeland security’ into political and academic debates in Europe has both advantages and drawbacks. It is therefore necessary to critically reflect on the concept of ‘homeland’.

Smith (1981) refers to the concept of ‘homeland’ in a triangular relationship between culture, state and territory. He identifies four dimensions to the homeland: boundaries, culture, self-sustainability and nation-building. In the US, after 9/11, homeland security also included a ‘concerted national effort’, implying that the former is not only the task of governmental agencies, but actually of the entire society, including the federal government, state and local authorities, the private sector and the American people. Why was a mere reference to the territory not enough to mobilise society? Why was it seen as necessary to frame the policy problem as a ‘national’ one, which includes a discussion about homeland, territory and ethnicity? While a ‘territory’ is the underlying feature of autonomous and abstract institutions within a modern state, a ‘homeland’ constitutes a space on the basis of which a sense of given historic community emerges as a modern nation (Smith 1981: 187). Therefore, speaking in terms of ‘homeland security’ has the advantage of capturing the important symbolic dimension of the ‘homeland’ with regard to political cohesion and nation-building.

‘Homeland security’ in Europe

One of the major characteristics of the European approach to homeland security rests on the fact that there has been hardly any effort on the part of EU policy-makers to mobilise society towards the protection of a ‘homeland’. In contrast, there have been more sustained efforts towards the definition of an EU territory through the deployment of a wide range of border control practices, as discussed by Pawlak and Kurowska later in this book, and the establishment of the External Borders Agency Frontex, which is the object of Léonard’s chapter. Thus, while the EU does not have a clearly defined territory in principle because of repeated enlargements and the lack of statehood, it is undergoing a process of territorial construction, which occurs against security threats, both external and internal.

There is no clear indication of what a European homeland might mean for Europeans, other than the treaty provision stating that ‘[the] Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime (Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU)). Therefore, rather than aiming to create a big platform of support for the European homeland, the EU sees itself as the one responsible for the provision of security – the ‘guardian of the people’ (Mitsilegas et al. 2003).

The complexity of this situation is compounded by the fact that the EU does not squarely fit within accepted categories of political organisation: less than a ‘federation’, but more than a mere ‘regime’. Most modern states sought and achieved national political communities out of diverse groups living within their borders (Linklater 1998). While this political community-building process is at the heart of the European integration process, it is still rather under construction. The EU has already made concerted efforts to prevent war and violence by building a new form of international political community, which erodes many of the traditional monopoly powers of the nation-state. However, attempts to define the territory through the twin processes of integration and enlargement have also created instances of ‘variable geometry’. Through various opt-outs, opt-ins (concerning the UK, Ireland and Denmark) and intergovernmental agreements, such as the Schengen and Prüm Conventions, attempts at defining the EU territory have been accompanied by trends obscuring this very definition.

It can be argued that a ‘European Homeland Security Area’ is emerging, which has a broader thematic and institutional scope than the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The new security environment that appeared in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has led to the development of a security dimension in a growing number of policy areas, such as asylum and migration, transport, critical infrastructure protection and civilian crisis management among others. The official EU terminology, however, imposes borders that are unnecessary from an analytical point of view, as a term such as the ‘AFSJ’ leaves aside issues such as transport or customs policy, which constitute important functional elements of homeland security. As the concept of ‘homeland security’ has not been very well received in Europe (Dubois 2002), the more traditional terms of ‘Justice and Home Affairs’, ‘Justice, Liberty and Security’ or ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’ are still predominant. However, although it is slightly different from the term ‘homeland’, it is interesting to note that ‘European Home Affairs’ is increasingly used. This was notably the case in the final report of the so-called ‘Future Group’ (2008). Also, the ‘Justice, Liberty, and Security’ Directorate-General (DG) in the Commission has recently been split into two new DGs (Justice (JUST) and Home Affairs (HOME)).

Moreover, the scholarly investigation of these developments has generally contributed to preserving the image of European homeland security as a highly disintegrated area, politically, functionally and academically. Most scholars tend to focus on only one of the aforementioned elements, such as asylum and migration or civil crisis management. Policies that cut across a large range of policy sectors such as counter-terrorism are also frequently disaggregated to allow for a fine-grained analysis of one of its dimensions (for exceptions, see Bures 2011 and Argomaniz 2011). This is understandable given the fast pace at which each of these policies has been growing and the level of expertise required for analysing them. However, such a disaggregated approach has the drawback of not addressing questions regarding the ‘big picture’, such as the development of European integration.

Neofunctionalism (Haas 1958) defines European integration as ‘the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new center, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over pre-existing national states’ (Haas 1958: 16). The ‘loyalty’ of the citizens of a community can shift towards a new political entity, notably supranational organisations such as the European Commission. Yet, opponents, on the other side of the conceptual debate, portray this differently. Moravcsik (1998, 1999) has portrayed the EU as largely intergovernmental and dominated by national interests. In his view, national leaders make choices in response to constraints and opportunities derived from economic interests of powerful domestic constituents and the relative power of each state in the international system. International institutions are merely there to bolster the credibility of interstate commitments (Moravcsik 1998). Thus, from this viewpoint, the EU strengthens the nation-state, rather than weakens it. This classic debate over the nature of EU integration can usefully inform the analysis of the development of European homeland security.

Towards European homeland security?

This book starts from the premise that the integration process in European internal security could progress towards the idea of homeland security as set out above, i.e. as security for a new kind of political community. Cooperation on various security matters was already taking place on the basis of bilateral contacts and within multilateral organisations even prior to the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 (Kaunert 2005). Several international conventions have been adopted in the frameworks of the United Nations (UN)¹ and the Council of Europe,² while cooperation has also developed in the framework of Interpol³ and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Financial Action Task Force (FATF).⁴ The increased international activity in these multilateral forums coincides with the development of intergovernmental security cooperation between EU Member States. In 1976, 12 twelve countries agreed to establish a group composed of their Home Affairs ministers, tasked with coordinating police cooperation and counter-terrorism efforts, which was known as the TREVI Group. The intergovernmental nature of this group meant that European institutions were not significantly engaged in its works. The adoption of the Single European Act, and the framing of the free movement of persons as one of the key elements of the Single Market, was a breakthrough. It began to shift the aforementioned cooperation towards the Community institutions. Consequently, new working groups established in the area of immigration, drugs and customs included representatives of the European Commission. The abolition of internal borders stimulated a discussion about giving more powers to the European Community, but it was not until the Maastricht Treaty that concrete decisions were taken. Until then, EU cooperation progressed largely outside the EU structures through the adoption of classic international legal instruments, such as conventions, resolutions and recommendations.

The Maastricht Treaty brought about some changes, with the creation of ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ (JHA) as a new policy area (Kaunert 2005). JHA was defined as encompassing ‘matters of common interest’ such as asylum and immigration, the external borders of the EU, judicial cooperation in civil and penal matters, customs cooperation, police cooperation for fighting and preventing terrorism, drug trafficking and other serious forms of international crime, as well as combating drug addiction and international fraud. However, JHA was created as the third ‘pillar’ of the EU (alongside the second ‘pillar’ devoted to foreign and security policy), which was governed b...