Following the recent attacks across Europe, governments are trying to grapple with the rapid evolution of threats from terrorism. The rapid radicalisation of individuals, often not on intelligence agencies radars, and their willingness to target civilians wherever they may be, is a vast challenge for countries looking to provide security for their citizens. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy articulated the scale of the challenge saying that “our enemy has no taboos, no limits, no morals, no borders”.
One militant may be a psychopath; another may follow an incremental road from fundamentalism to terrorism; another such as one of the Boston bombers Jahar Tsarnaev, went straight from slacker to violent jihadist. Self-radicalisation is difficult to spot with individuals often not on any intelligence agencies radar rapidly moving from thought to action. Rather than individuals or groups connected to terrorist networks which can be infiltrated or have their plans thwarted, the threat of today is delinked and therefore even more dangerous.
Such is the complexity of the threat that simple sounding broad brush policies such as Donald Trump’s proposal ‘make America safe again’ by banning foreign Muslims from the US gain traction within certain constituencies. Yet this form of profiling has the potential to further divide societies and support increased recruitment to ISIL. As former Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti said recently on Newsnight “terrorism provokes to get a reaction”. In France attacks have prompted and sustained a state of emergency that has seen civil liberties squeezed and thousands of house raids across the country.
For too long ‘terrorism’ has been used as a term of political expediency rather than as a means of understanding the nature of the threat. Framing the genuine nature of the threat is essential to setting both expectations and policy towards addressing it. George W Bush was derided for declaring a ‘war on terrorism’, a term that his successor dropped. Yet often the deployment of troops onto the streets or upping of military strikes against ISIS targets in the Middle East would appear to suggest there is a purely military solution. Yet as the frequency of attacks has increased there is also a need to understand what level of risk we face as a price for living in free societies.
There is no such thing of a risk free society and we can’t get rid of terrorism as we can’t get rid of crime, instead we manage both the issue and the perceptions of it. Con Coughlin wrote that Europe has to prepare, has it has in the past, for atrocities to become a feature of everyday life as it was in the 1970s and 1980s when far-left activists, such as Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang and Italy’s Red Brigades, undertook a series of high-profile terrorist attacks aimed at destroying Western democracies in the hope that they would be replaced by communist rule.
In this new era of threat European citizens will need to adjust to this new normal. The nightmare alternative would be to allow a militaristic and civil liberty crushing government response that proceeds in the shadows without proper checks and balances. Albert Camus once warned of this ‘bloody wedding of terrorism & repression’.
Civil society in Europe represents a moderate majority fighting against a radical minority. Speaking at the Democratic Party Convention Michelle Obama was spot on in saying “when someone is cruel, or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level ― no, our motto is, when they go low, we go high”.
In order to ‘go high’ in this bloody new chapter of threats from terrorism there needs to be effective leadership towards the issue. Rather than simply reacting from atrocity to atrocity and sliding into an era of flags permanently at half-mast and black armbands permanently worn, there needs to be a serious, and global, conversation about modern terrorism and policies to prevent, mitigate and disrupt it. This conversation will have to tackle difficult and contentious issues; from integration, immigration, assimilation, multiculturalism, inequality, new technologies and the role of ideology and identity. But we can’t afford to shy away from grappling with these and sleep walking in reactive upon reactive response. So much of the problems are born out of the consequences of a globalised world and it is only a global response that can address it.