The European Union's counter terrorism policy and its responsiveness to threats over the last two decades

Abstract

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the EU felt a stronger responsibility for strengthening its ability in countering terrorism by putting a number of counter-terrorism policies in place. Even though terrorism remains one of the areas mainly a Member States’ competence, over the years the EU has still managed to adopt several measures in response to the attacks conducted. This largely depended on the relevant threats which were prominent at the time in light of the developments that terrorism has highly gone through over the last two decades. The dissertation will thus be using a qualitative method to analyse how the threat of terrorism has changed over the years, what measures has the EU adopted to counter-terrorism, what the main developments were, and whether the EU has been successful or not in countering terrorism through the implementation of these policies. The focus will be put on the concept of radicalisation, particularly by being applied to a case study on the Netherlands to analyse what some Member States are doing at the national level in harmonisation with the EU level. One of the main limitations encountered was that the EU had several measures related to terrorism, even if they were not specifically adopted with the aim of countering terrorism. Consequently, the dissertation includes the main measures and policies enlisted on the European Commission’s website. The dissertation determines that both at the EU level and national level in the Netherlands, their counter-terrorism policy has been quite successful from the high number of arrests. However, at the same time the remaining high numbers of failed/foiled/attempted attacks reflect that the EU has not been so successful in preventing attacks from occurring in the first place. Thus, the dissertation concludes that rather than considering terrorism as only a crime, more research should be done to identify what leads individuals to become terrorists in the first place. A research study focusing on terrorism and radicalisation with frequent reports, analysis, expert meetings, and policymaker recommendations is recommended to be established to provide a more long-term solution to terrorism from the currently existing policies.