Transnational Islam and Regional Security: Cooperation and Diversity Between Europe and North Africa by Frédéric Volpi

Author:Frédéric Volpi [Volpi, Frédéric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317998457
Goodreads: 18565205
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Discourses and practices within Europe and in the Euro-Mediterranean area have thus shown that there is no unified approach to radical Islamist groups, or even towards the concept of contemporary transnational terrorism. The impact of 9/11 has not been the straight forward securitization of relations between European and Islamist actors. There are several processes taking place at the same time.

At the national level, as shown in the case of the UK, there has indeed been a process of securitization of Islam. The discourse has increasingly stressed the need for emergency measures and powers to counter the threat from religious radicals, even at the risk of civil liberties, especially so after 7/7. However the security discourse is split between foreign based security threats such as North African or wider Arab imported terrorism and the perceived threat from radicalized indigenous populations, stemming largely from a Pakistani dominated local migrant community.

Within the EU, there is a plurality of discourses. The internal EU strategy for countering terrorism has indeed shown signs of securitization. The lists of terrorist organizations have progressively included not only a number of ‘jihadists’, but also a few Islamist organizations that not everybody in the world regards as just terrorist. Hamas is a case in point. The European Security Strategy has also mentioned religious fundamentalism as a key threat. At the same time, trends towards a securitization of the relationship between the EU and radical Islamist organizations are to be cast against the EU approach to democracy promotion in the Mediterranean. The rhetoric of democratization has permeated the EU political agenda, but at the same time the practice of fund allocation through MEDA and through the EIDHR shows a clear reluctance of the EU in deciding what to do with Islamic-leaning NGOs. The EU seems unable to choose where to draw the line whenever reference to Islam is made, and thus hesitates between its desire for new powers to fight radical Islamist groups and the reluctance to acknowledge the social and political role that Islamist parties play in Muslim societies.

The situation within the EMP is equally complex, and increasingly fraught with problems. The initial fragile compromise embodied by the Barcelona Declaration has not withstood the test of the terrorist attacks in the USA, Spain and the UK. The EU's role as an honest broker has become untenable. After a period of apparent convergence of understandings about how to fight terrorism, this has produced the fiasco of the Barcelona summit in 2005. The de facto boycott of Arab and Israeli governments has underscored the diminished authority that the EU now commands in the area. While the trend might be reversed in the future, it would take a substantial investment of resources on the part of the EU to do so. More generally, the time might have come for the EU to choose among conflicting discourses, as the result of Palestinian legislative elections has emphasized.

The overall picture is thus of a lack of convergence on a securitizing agenda between Europe and its Mediterranean

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