U.S.-Style Antiterrorism Changes Floated for European Union Amid Chafing at U.S. Policies

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The European Union is hearing calls for U.S.-style restructuring to fight terrorism, despite continued strong resistance in Europe to Washington’s approach to the struggle, prominent experts from both sides of the Atlantic say in a collection of papers out this month.

According to the editor of an influential French journal, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent U.S. reaction have reversed a successful European effort to stake out an independent path against terrorism and provoked widespread resentment in Europe. A U.S. researcher agrees that Washington has too often sought to impose its will after Sept. 11 but argues that U.S. policy is understandable in light of events and of the characteristics of the U.S. population.

Their papers were included in European Homeland Security Post-March 11^th and Transatlantic Relations, published this month by the Center for European Policy Studies and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  

Cultures et Conflits Editor-in-Chief Didier Bigo writes that “many voices” in Europe are calling for U.S.-style reforms such as an EU homeland-security agency, an EU intelligence-fusion system and an “interagency antiterrorism community” focused on “prevention” and “proactivity.”

At the same time, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques professor says, U.S.-European judicial and intelligence cooperation since Sept. 11 has been more difficult than reported, and U.S. reliance on technology and on the military to fight terrorism is unwise.

“Some recent work by journalists and several internal [government] reports … affirm that everything has been radically transformed … thanks to the strengthened political will of the United States and President [George W.] Bush and to his insistence that the European Union get with the program,” Bigo writes.

“Often based on political statements, press accounts and superficial interviews,” he writes, “this ‘research’ is more like political communication without any critical approach than analysis of policies at work and their problems. Without claiming exhaustiveness, and based on interviews we have conducted over the last year with antiterrorism professionals from all over Europe … our judgment is much more nuanced and our outlook more pessimistic.”

According to Bigo, an effort to impose U.S. views — on matters ranging from air traffic to military campaigns — on European countries is meeting with widespread resistance, and European responses to the Madrid train attack on March 11 of this year have been more effective than Washington’s post-Sept. 11 approach.

“Between the option of war using armies and intelligence services and the option of a judicial crackdown using judges with broadened powers supported by police acting on a transnational scale, the Americans did not hesitate for a second. They believed too easily that the war ‘solution’ could put an end to transnational political violence, but it only unleashed a little more violence,” Bigo writes. “On the other hand, the Spanish government’s response to Madrid — placing confidence in its police and judges — was much more effective, at least over the near term.”

Europol, Interpol and national intelligence agencies in Europe are protective of their turf and skeptical about U.S.-style intelligence reorganization, according to Bigo, and their resistance is increased by a U.S. bid to relegate them to a secondary role in international operations.

Despite such friction, members of the EU Parliament and independent experts have called for U.S.-style antiterrorism and intelligence restructuring in EU institutions — a debate that strikingly resembles the one being conducted in Washington.

“Many arguments have been exchanged about where to place the coordination and centralization of intelligence at the European level and about the presence and role of Brussels’ [i.e., the European Union’s] institutions,” Bigo writes. “Once again, this European ‘debate’ appears derived in part from internal battles in the United States.”

Brookings Institution foreign-policy expert Jeremy Shapiro, in a separate paper in the same collection, paints a more optimistic picture of European-U.S. cooperation but acknowledges “fundamental differences.” According to Shapiro, who directs research at the Washington think-tank’s Center on the United States and Europe, the two entities “have usually reached agreement and have avoided any serious public disputes to date, despite much goading by the press on both sides of the Atlantic.”

“Superficially, the externalization of U.S. counterterrorism policy has had quite positive effects on relations with trans-Atlantic allies,” Shapiro says. “The U.S. government has accepted that it will need military, intelligence, law-enforcement and judicial cooperation. … Particularly on the level of intelligence, both sides report that contacts have increased dramatically and that they have shown some results in disrupting threats.”

He adds, however, that “U.S. homeland-security policy as now configured demands that other parts of the world fall into line with U.S. domestic political needs, as evidenced in Iraq, on border control, on data exchange, etc. Such demands inevitably alienate other countries, particularly powerful countries such as those in Europe that the U.S. desperately needs as allies for realizing its long-term counterterrorism goals.”

“Europe is not particularly high on the list of foreign-policy priorities for the U.S., which is now overwhelmingly focused on the Middle East and Asia,” Shapiro says. “American policy-makers who do not deal directly with European issues have become astonishingly indifferent to what European leaders or European publics think. … [They believe] Europeans will whine and complain, but, in the end, they will have no choice but to conform to U.S. policy needs. They are perhaps wrong in this assumption, but they have yet to be proven so.”

U.S. policies are understandable, Shapiro says, in light of the scarcity of resources to fight terrorism, the impossibility of making the country “100 percent secure,” the proliferation of reports warning about unlikely attack scenarios and the U.S. public’s “apathy” and “short attention span.”

“There is no way that the terrorists will think of something that the wider policy-analysis community has not considered. As Paul Samuelson said in a different context, ‘Economists have predicted eight out of the last two recessions,’” Shapiro writes. The result, he says, is that the public will be likely to blame leaders for insufficient preventive action when an attack occurs.

The combination of these factors, Shapiro says, made Sept. 11 a “huge and fleeting opportunity to reorganize the government to fight this problem in a manner that had long been understood to be necessary but which heretofore had been politically impossible. … The government acted vigorously and indiscriminately, but, in any case, very much in the manner that governments everywhere respond to such emergencies.”

According to Bigo, Europeans continue to reject U.S. arguments that the possibility of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction justifies “proactive” or “preventive” military strikes — an approach Bigo sees as related to an unrealistic U.S. faith in intelligence generally and technology in particular. European skepticism about such a stance, he adds, could be souring European-U.S. antiterrorism cooperation.

“Despite American strategists’ expectations, no capabilities exist to predict the future or to organize it as one likes. A belief in the existence of weapons of mass destruction that are ready for use and can be launched in 45 minutes does not mean the weapons necessarily exist as such at a given time, even if Iraqi plans are found that envision such a use,” Bigo writes.

“It is not true,” he continues, “that a general collection of raw data can be obtained and filtered in time to prevent violent incidents that have not been detected by traditional infiltration techniques, [but] such is the crude lie of all the intelligence agencies, which would have us believe that they will predict the future if we give them the technical means to do so and allow them access to all public and private databases.”

“It is impossible to predict the future and think it always necessary to act on the basis of the ‘worst-case scenario.’ This approach is paranoid, in the strongest sense of the word,” he says. “There is no absolute security, and the tyranny of surveillance in no way prevents the irruption of violence; instead, it encourages [terrorist] vocations.”

Seemingly responding directly to Bigo’s concerns, Shapiro writes, “No one believes that intelligence can always be accurate nor threats always identified appropriately, but a prevention policy responds both to the reality of a new threat that has a demonstrated potential for surprise and to the domestic need to take the offensive.”

“Moreover, prevention is nothing new, nor is it peculiarly American,” Shapiro says. “The real question is … who can legitimately and efficiently decide when prevention is necessary. On the domestic level, both Europe and America have some legitimate and effective mechanisms for accomplishing this; on the international level, the appropriate balance between legitimacy and efficiency has not been found.”

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