Responding to capricious events

Tim King canters through EU terrorism policies, but a slower-paced book might offer greater perspective.

The publishing house John Harper will be known to policy wonks for its volumes on the main EU institutions. The granddaddy of them all is The European Parliament, now in its seventh edition. The European Commission is in its third edition as is The Council of the European Union. It seems unlikely that the 2005 publication, The European Constitution, will run to that many, unless it is swiftly repackaged as ‘The Reform Treaty’, with all mention of anthems and flags removed.

So what is the likely shelf-life of John Harper’s latest book The European Union and Terrorism? Will it, like the volumes on the EU institutions, become a standard on those College of Europe reading lists and a useful reference work, with sales sufficient to justify the occasional update and revision? Or will it, like works on the European constitution, become something of a historical curiosity, adorning the library shelf but taken down only infrequently?

The book appears to be aimed somewhere in between. It has some pretensions to be a definitive guide to EU policymaking on terrorism. The nine annexes set out key documents - Council framework decisions on the European arrest warrant and on combating terrorism, the EU counter-terrorism strategy, a Commission communication on critical infrastructure protection.

But the chapters that precede those annexes are, for the most part, keenly aware that they can only provide a snapshot of a changing landscape, accompanied by some interim conclusions.

For example, David Spence, the book’s editor, attempts in his introductory chapter to weigh up the successes and failures of Gijs de Vries, the EU’s first counter-terrorism co-ordinator, who resigned in March of this year. De Vries’s departure is only one example of how vulnerable this book is to the capriciousness of events.

But perhaps it is not as vulnerable as one might suppose to the activities of the terrorists. Spence argues that, for all the whirlwind of activity after the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, "condolences and political support to the US", putting in place EU counter-terrorism measures took much longer and was put through the procedural mill.

His argument is that though the EU’s measures are still imperfect, taken together they are "light years away from the initial floundering which characterised Europe in the weeks after 9/11".

The Spence thesis, perhaps unsurprisingly from a Commission official, is that counter-terrorism has brought a new dynamic to EU policymaking, but that more co-operation at the EU level and more action are needed. "Despite progress in critical infrastructure protection, Europe continues to be congenitally unprepared for the next crisis." For the most part, Spence’s fellow contributors to this volume appear to share these assumptions.

Magnus Ekengren argues that if counter-terrorism is to be effective then the EU needs to break down the distinctions between internal and external policy. He adds some interesting Scandinavian detail on how the different roles of the army and the police have been narrowed by counter-terrorism. Hans Nilsson sets out the history of judicial co-operation between governments not just since 2001 but (and the historical context is important) since the 1950s. Kim Eling puts EU efforts into their international context, with the United Nations and the G7’s Financial Action Task Force. Fraser Cameron writes specifically about the tensions and the co-operation with the US.

Mirjam Dittrich discusses what the EU has done and might do to avoid turning its own citizens to terrorism - known in the jargon as "combating radicalisation and recruitment". "New counter-terrorism measures must respect human rights, if they are not to backfire," she writes. It is left to Florian Geyer to flag up ways in which counter-terrorism policy has undermined human rights, looking in particular at the extraordinary renditions controversy. Spence leaves hanging the question of whether effective counter terrorism is compatible with human rights conventions and the principles of liberal democracy. But perhaps he should have inserted an "alleged" when he wrote: "Half of the 706 terrorists arrested in 2006 in 15 member states of the EU were of Islamic origin."

The admission in the conclusion that, "this book has cantered through EU policies related to international terrorism" is a bit of a giveaway. A more measured pace might have addressed more directly the inflammatory issue of whether EU member states are prepared to trust each other. If not, why not? If so, which? There is not much on the interplay between the EU’s response to international terrorism and the more familiar (to some) intra-state terrorism (eg, Corsica, Basque separatists). This book, perhaps because it is written by officials and denizens of think-tanks, pays more attention to procedures and structures than it does to personalities. Another account might have played up the cast of Nicolas Sarkozy, David Blunkett, Guy Verhofstadt and Michael McDowell.

So this is not the complete encyclopaedia, nor the final word. But the editor and publisher are probably right that, such has been the scale and pace of the EU’s work on terrorism, an interim guide is still of value.

• The European Union and Terrorism

Edited by David Spence. John Harper, 270 pages.

Tim King canters through EU terrorism policies, but a slower-paced book might offer greater perspective.