ter r I
n 2010 an eminent European academic, Professor Oldrich Bures, presented a view
that Europe’s transnational counter terrorism effort is suffering because of the lack of a shared perception of the contemporary terrorist threat among European Union (EU) member states. Amongst the reasons he offered for this apparent weakness was the lack of a genuine baseline terrorist threat assessment, “which makes the development of a common terrorist threat perception rather difficult, if not impossible”. Our depiction of national threat perception in accessible and easily understood formats has improved somewhat since Professor Bures’ ‘can do better’ report-card and I have observed real improvements over the past five years, especially in a number of published national threat assessments across Europe.
Improvements can always be made in a common understanding and approach to terrorism across Europe’s borders and there will always be national differences in the terrorism threats that are likely to affect different jurisdictions. There is an understandable national character to the threat and how each European government translates its risk analyses into threat information. I believe that the exchange of views and open debate of the threat from terrorism is healthy and continues to improve, regardless of some of the more downbeat assessments. This is vital as businesses that work across Europe’s various national jurisdictions need to be confident they can access meaningful threat information; information that articulates national threats but in ways that allow for transnational comparative analysis.
Cogent and co-ordinated threat analysis is freely available, in English as a common tongue in northern Europe and in national languages for the rest of Europe. In fact,
12 © CI TY S ECURI TY MAGAZ INE – AUTUMN 2013
even the assumption of a north-south, old- new EU divide is not valid, as Spain published its national security strategy in English this year. So, while some European governments may not have fully embraced the principle of allowing their people access to their assessments of risks, there is evidence that there is a trend for open discourse on what terrorism is and how should it be tackled. In this regard, the work of Europol is to be particularly commended.
Europol’s view on terrorism trends
The most recent edition of Europol’s Terrorism Situation and Trend (TE-SAT) report, published in April 2013, develops a distinctly European view of terrorism threats. In the TE-SAT’s Foreword, Europol’s director Rob Wainwright lays out a common EU definition of terrorism, something that many multi-national organisations struggle with. EU Member States define terrorism as acts which aim to intimidate populations, compel states to comply with the perpetrators’ demands and/or destabilise the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or international organisation. Developing a definition is a fairly strong indicator of an endemic shared view amongst a coalition of the willing.
European nations that openly share views on terrorism
How is the TE-SAT’s structure of threat depiction recapitulated in national views of the threat from terrorism?
My research covered publicly available (on the Internet) threat analyses offered in English. The websites consulted were those associated with national intelligence and security agencies in:
• Czech Republic • Denmark • Ireland (Eire) • Spain
• Netherlands • Norway • Sweden
• Germany • UK
How shared is Europe’s shared view on the threat from
Most of these countries have experienced acts of terrorism and fully expect to experience more from their own resident populations and from extremist organisations beyond their borders. The manifestation of the Europol typologies may be present in different forms and relative intensities but there appears to be a developing shared view on the national burden of determined extremists to attack the fabric of national societies.
How shared is the European shared view on Terrorism?
Using the Europol TE-SAT structure, I compared attitudes to threat and examined whether there is a shared view on national terrorism threat analyses and whether there is evidence of a more of a common view than is being offered by some; realising that this may reflect the views of a club within the EU club, rather than the whole Union.
The national threat assessments are classified into threat groups in relation to the Europol taxonomy of terror groups:
• Religiously-inspired terrorism • Ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorism • Left-wing and anarchist terrorism • Right-wing terrorism • Single-issue terrorism
Generally, most north European nations had a shared view on the categories, but some like Eire did not develop their threat taxonomy beyond their own dissident Irish Republican groups, which in the Republic were more criminal in nature than terrorist, i.e. supporting and facilitating terrorism in Northern Ireland.
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