The European Union's Fight Against Terrorism: Discourse, Policies, Identity by Christopher Baker-Beall

Author:Christopher Baker-Beall [Baker-Beall, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, Terrorism, General
ISBN: 9781526100825
Google: CW25DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01HS3YDHM
Goodreads: 43601720
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The aim of this chapter has been to demonstrate how the EU’s ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse contributes to a particular conceptualisation of terrorism, which helps to both shape and make possible the EU’s counter-terrorism response. It has been argued that this is achieved through four interlinked discourse strands that, when taken together, construct the ‘terrorist’ other, against which the identity of the EU is produced and reproduced. Although each strand of the discourse has evolved with varying degrees of complexity, they have also remained consistent across the period analysed and can therefore be understood as continuities within the ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse. These four strands of the discourse construct terrorism: first, as a threat to the ‘values’ of the European Union; second, as a ‘new’ and ‘evolving’ threat; third, as a form of crime or a criminal act; and fourth, as an act committed primarily by non-state actors, wherein the state is the primary victim and never the perpetrator. It has been argued that these strands tie into other aspects of the discourse including the fear that terrorists are seeking to acquire and/or use WMDs or CBRN material, as well as the perceived threat from ‘lone actor’ terrorism or, since the emergence of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the threat from ‘returning foreign fighters’. As I noted earlier in the chapter, these discourse strands help to construct the image of the ‘terrorist’ other, a radical threat to the EU who is potentially a ‘criminal’ with links to ‘organised crime’, a ‘new’ and ‘evolving’ type of threat that is predominantly ‘religious’ in nature, a non-state actor, a member of a group or an individual, such as a ‘lone actor’ or a ‘returning foreign fighter’, who seeks to inflict ‘massive casualties’ against the EU and its member states. This is a particularly powerful image that structures EU policy around the future-oriented fear of potential terrorist attacks and imagined scenarios of potentially devastating terrorist events. It is a representation of threat that the EU has invoked at regular instances, throughout the period analysed, to justify the development of its role not just as an actor in counter-terrorism but also to legitimise its ever-increasing role as a security actor in various aspects of internal and external security.

The chapter argued that the ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse has played a key role in structuring the EU approach as a criminal justice-based approach to counter-terrorism, which has differentiated it from the war-based approach of the US. Throughout the formulation of its counter-terrorism response the EU has articulated the need to develop policies that are consistent with EU values, such as the protection of human rights and civil liberties, reflecting the EU’s own self-perception as a ‘civilian’ or ‘normative’ power. It has been argued that this conceptualisation of EU identity, which is normally used to explain the external projection of EU identity, can also be used to explore and understand the internal projection of EU identity and to recognise various ‘others’ against which EU identity is produced and reproduced.

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