Justice and Home Affairs Post-September 11

Abstract

The sense of being engaged in a new kind of war pervades a great deal of thinking post-September 11. The qualitatively new feature of the struggle implied by the ‘War on Terrorism’ is attributed, on the one hand, to its asymmetry, insofar as it involves non-state actors, and to the scale of destruction the adversary is willing to inflict on civilian targets — interpreted as an affront to liberal democratic values — on the other. The belief that something fundamental has changed in terms of the type of conflicts states could find themselves engaged in today, and the sense that the ‘War on Terror’ epitomizes this new kind of vulnerability, has led to a series of measures aimed at reducing this perceived ‘security deficit’. Despite the current sense of exceptionalism associated with ‘9/11’, the Madrid bombings in 2004 and the London attacks in 2005, international terrorism is not new to the security policy agenda in Europe. In fact, it has been an issue of concern for some 30 years. Over the last three decades, however, its potency as a challenge to stability and security capable of inducing greater intra-European cooperation waned with its inclusion in a continuum of externalized (though traditionally conceived as) internal threats to security. Emphasizing the transnational, the foreign element of threats to ‘internal’ security has permitted a series of measures that further reinforce the security dimension of both member states’ state-citizen relations and the EU’s area of ‘freedom, justice and security’ (AFJS) and, ultimately, modify state sovereignty as expressed in the production of public order.