The Revolution in Security Affairs: Hard and Soft Security Dynamics in the 21st Century

The neat dividing lines between hard and soft, civil and military security are rapidly dissolving, requiring far more flexibility and causing much confusion as allies and partners have disagreed significantly about how to manage such complexity. Many Europeans continue to recognize only as much threat as they can afford. For them “soft” security often means no security commitment at all. Whilst America needs the European allies for its excessively “hard” security policy to work effectively, it refuses to recognize the extent of that need because of the implications such a recognition would have for control over security outcomes. Therein lies a dilemma, brought to public attention in the fight against catastrophic terror and the war in Iraq. This article explores how both sides of the transatlantic divide might begin to cope with this new set of problems, with a new set of relationships in a new set of ways.     

The Importance of Europe in the Global Campaign Against Terrorism

ABSTRACT

Terrorism and how to respond to it looms large in the current transatlantic debate, with the Europeans often being accused of failing to recognise terrorism as the major strategic issue of the early twenty-first century and thus putting their own security as well as that of others at risk. This is both true and false. It is true in the sense that fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the Europeans still lack a global strategic vision, never mind how the threat from terrorism might impact upon it. But it is false in the sense that it understates what the Europeans can and are doing to reduce and manage terrorism on a global scale. The article is structured into four sections. The first examines terrorist activity in Europe post-9/11. The second deals with how the Europeans responded to 9/11 collectively within the EU. The third section focuses on what are termed the “outreach” activities of the Europeans via the United National Security Council, G-8, OSCE, NATO, and the European Union. And finally the article concludes that it is this outreach by the Europeans that holds the most promise for effectively countering international terrorism, that the Americans are dependent on this activity, and that the Europeans have to modify their strategic vision in order to deliver more effectively.     

The Psychology of Terrorism: “Syndrome” Versus “Tool” Perspectives

ABSTRACT

Two psychological perspectives on terrorism are distinguished, approaching it as a “syndrome” and as a “tool,” respectively. According to the “syndrome” view, terrorism represents a psychologically meaningful construct with identifiable characteristics on individual and group levels of analysis. According to the “tool” perspective, terrorism represents a strategic instrument that any party in a conflict with another may use. Research thus far has found little support for the “syndrome” view. Terrorists do not seem to be characterized by a unique set of psychological traits or pathologies. Nor has research uncovered any particular “root causes” of terrorism. The vast heterogeneity of terrorism's users is consistent with the “tool” view, affording an analysis of terrorism in terms of means-ends psychology. The “tool” view implies conditions under which potential perpetrators may find terrorism more or less appealing, hence offering guidance for the “war on terrorism.”     

Consoling Display of Strength or Emotional Overstrain? The Gendered Framing of the Early “War on Terrorism” in Transatlantic Comparison

This contribution addresses the diverging discourses of the United States, France and Germany in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001 in New York and Washington, with a focus on gender. As a discourse analysis, it explores the ways in which the different narratives instantiate dichotomous conceptions of gender. It is argued that owing to the centrality of gendered constructions for identity, and owing to the mutually constitutive nature of the relation between identity and foreign policy, the comparative perspective adopted adds to the understanding of the disparities in enacting foreign policy between these three close transatlantic allies. Not only does this paper expose the contingency of the gendered underpinnings of the US, French and German high-level policy discourses that were constitutive of the early “war on terrorism” but it also shows how these stories matter. The three countries' foreign policy formulations in response to “9/11”, particularly their respective choices between identifying the attacks as acts of war or crime, pursuit or rejection of regime change, and unilateralism and multilateralism, make explicit that the varying degrees of dichotomously gendered framings of identity are constitutively significant for foreign policy formulations.     

Inventing terrorists: the nexus of intelligence and Islamophobia

The transatlantic Islamophobia industry, emboldened by US intelligence efforts to entrap Muslims, appears to have helped to increase permissible levels of Islamophobia across the US, as illustrated by the fiery anti-Muslim rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign. In this article, I first look at five key leaders of the Islamophobia industry who also claim to be “terrorism experts” and have links to US and Israeli intelligence. I then describe US law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslims and its invention of terrorists, including a map of the “successful terrorist prosecutions” claimed by the US Department of Justice, most of which were tried only as criminal cases. Finally, I explore in-depth the case against the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity based in Texas that was run by Palestinian-Americans and targeted by both the state and the Islamophobia industry for its dubious links to “terrorism”, helping to legitimate the Bush W. Administration’s “War on Terror”. I argue that this nexus of intelligence and Islamophobia has empowered anti-Muslim voices that were formerly marginal.     

Sam Fisher and the “war on terror”: an analysis of Splinter Cell in a post-9/11 context

This article examines the values and attitudes present within the 2002 video game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and the methods employed to convey them. It compares the game’s message with the rhetoric contained in the Bush administration’s post-9/11 “war on terror” narrative. A qualitative content analysis of a Splinter Cell “game movie” and gameplay sessions is undertaken to examine the messages communicated through elements of simulation and representation. This article finds that Splinter Cell and the “war on terror” narrative express similar perspectives of terrorism and counterterrorism. First, both exaggerate the physical and normative threat of terrorism, and portray it as overwhelmingly powerful. Second, both sources justify violent counterterrorism action through claims of necessity, urgency and self-defence. Third, violence is consistently portrayed as effective for achieving the desired objective. Finally, violence and military action are represented as simple solutions that ultimately lead to victory over terrorism. The parallels between the messages within Splinter Cell and the “war on terror” rhetoric indicate that the game was shaped by the post-9/11 culture in which it was developed. More significantly, however, Splinter Cell perpetuates and legitimises the “war on terror” narrative by conveying its message through an immersive interactive environment.     

Balancing against threats or bandwagoning with power? Europe and the transatlantic relationship after the Cold War

The United States has played an important role in European security since the early 20^th century. From the time of the end of the Cold War, this role has changed as a consequence of the lack of a common territorial threat and the overwhelming power of the United States relative to Europe. How have European states responded to the challenges of the American world order? Are they adapting their security policies to match the challenges of US security policy and the American world order? What are the implications of the European response for the transatlantic relationship? This article seeks to describe and explain European security behaviour in the American world through the prism of two realist theories: balance of power realism and balance of threat realism. Despite sharing a common starting point in realist assumptions, each theory allows us to tell a different story about Europe's position in the American world order as well as the opportunities and challenges it faces.     

Living Up to a New Role in the World: The Challenges of “Global Britain”

Theresa May promised a new role for the United Kingdom in the world, dubbed “Global Britain.” But what challenges arise from supposedly being more open to the world while decoupling from the European Union? This article explores how much the UK can meet the expectations stemming from a new, unabashedly global posture. Examining the rhetoric of British foreign policy since 1945 is juxtaposed against the emerging language of global openness after Brexit to illustrate what the UK's partners might expect for trade, security, and global governance. In evaluating the strategic benefits of using the rhetoric of globalism after EU withdrawal, this article examines the British state's capacity to find the administrative resources, public expenditure, and elite consensus necessary to redefine the country's position in world affairs. While the political expediency of devising a new role cannot be faulted, the strategic value of “Global Britain” appears limited in light of this analysis.     

The transatlantic dialogue on Iran: the European subaltern and hegemonic constraints in the implementation of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran

This article analyses the US–EU transatlantic dialogue on the Iranian nuclear dossier with a particular view to the implications for EU foreign policy on Iran. Doing so, it uses neo-Gramscian scholarship to put the EU’s “over-compliance” with Iran sanctions into perspective. Constrained by the imperatives of hegemonic coercion in the form of US financial Iran sanctions against third country entities and with the hegemonic consent of a Western US-led “historic bloc”, Europe was relegated to a subaltern below its mediatory potential. It will be shown how this finding complicates the EU’s ambition to renew relations with Iran. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with experts and delegation members from the P5+1, this article thus analyses “the normative element” in the transatlantic security dialogue on Iran at a time where the latter is undergoing a sea change in the wake of the implementation of the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” of July 2015.     

Undermining the transatlantic democracy agenda? The Arab Spring and Saudi Arabia's counteracting democracy strategy

Saudi Arabian foreign policy is often declared to be countering the possible democratic transitions of the Arab Spring. As such, Saudi Arabia has been cast as a “counter-revolutionary” force in the Middle East and North Africa. This article explores the extent to which this has been the case in Egypt and Bahrain, and the extent to which Saudi foreign policy has challenged United States and European Union democracy promotion efforts in those countries. The article highlights how the transatlantic democracy promotion strategy is complicated by a conflict of interests problem, which leads them to promote democracy on an ad hoc and incremental basis. As a result, their efforts and larger strategic thinking are undermined by Saudi Arabia in Egypt. However, in Bahrain, transatlantic democracy promotion is itself muted by the strategic interest in containing Iran. As a result, Saudi Arabia can be seen as a regional countervailing power but this is implicitly in line with transatlantic policy. Tensions with Saudi foreign policy in Bahrain are over how best to manage the uprisings and maintain the status quo, rather than a conflict over political transition.     

Damned If You Do,Damned If You Don't: Performative Power and the Strategy of Conventional and Nuclear Defusing

This article seeks to initiate a new round of strategic intellectual innovation in an era when threats posed by non-state terrorist organizations and their state supporters do not resemble Cold War threats. Based on an interpretative sociological reading of the concepts of power, security, and rationality, it argues that a “damned if you do, damned if you don't” dilemma is to the post-Cold War era what the danger of surprise attack or unintended nuclear war was to the Cold War: the defining structural threat of international politics. The dilemma leaves states confronting asymmetrical warfare with the choice of reacting with force to a terrorist act or practicing appeasement. Neither approach, however, can achieve the goal of putting an end to terrorism. Deterrence sustains the dilemma by providing a rationale for why force should be used and why self-restraint is irrational. This article proposes a third option, defusing, which may be accomplished by denial (preventing provocateurs from dragging states into the use of force) and restructuration (transforming the structure and rules of the situation). Defusing relies on “performative power”—the capacity to project a dramatic and credible performance on the world stage and to decouple social actors, their audiences, and their most deeply held strategic beliefs. The force of the argument is illustrated by examples from the global “war on terror,” the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2008–09 operation “Cast Lead” in Gaza, and the Iranian nuclear crisis.     

European Security,Strategic Culture,and the Use of Force

This article examines post-cold war European attitudes to the use of force, focusing on the UK, France, Germany and Poland. It argues that European strategic culture reflects the security environment of the second half of the Twentieth century, and increasingly acts as an impediment to developing new European security strategies relevant to the early twenty-first century. The author argues that new thinking about security and strategy is required in Europe, and suggests six principles that should inform a revised European security strategy appropriate to the post-9/11 world.     

The first casualty in the war against terror: the fall of NATO and Europe's reluctant coming of age

In 2003, hardly a keynote speech goes by without Western leaders stressing that the transatlantic bond is as important as ever. This is perhaps true – a timelier question is whether the same can be said for the perception of common values and common threats that used to define this partnership and its sole institutional link: NATO. This essay explores five security policy conundrums that point towards a revised burden-sharing and power-sharing in the transatlantic strategic partnership: the UK's ambiguous role in the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP); the blocking of the formal bond between NATO and the EU; the implications of a change in US policy towards Europe; NATO's improbable move into soft security and, finally, NATO's invocation of Article 5 in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.     

How the West Was One: France,America, and the “Huntingtonian Reversal”

Samuel Huntington was such a prolific scholar that it is sometimes difficult for researchers to keep up with his many policy analyses and recommendations. This article deals with one important Huntingtonian thesis, of the late 1990s. The thesis appertains to Huntington's worry about the US becoming a “lonely superpower” due to a French-led campaign to drive a wedge between America and its transatlantic allies. The authors detail the current irony inherent in what they call a “Huntingtonian reversal.” Today, unlike in 1999 when Huntington propounded his “lonely superpower” thesis, it can appear as if it is America that seeks to drive a wedge between itself and the European allies. Moreover, should the West become “one” again, it will in part be due to French efforts to revive transatlantic solidarity.     

Still focused on the Atlantic: accounting for the limited Europeanization of Portuguese security policy

This article examines the limited Europeanization of contemporary Portuguese security policy and highlights how the persistence of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the emergence of the Lusophone world have shaped Portuguese participation in the European Union's (EU's) Common Foreign and Security Policy in recent years, particularly in Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions in Africa and in the European Defence Agency's co-operation activities. Europeanization's conceptual weaknesses, combined with the mutually reinforcing nature of transatlantic, EU and Lusophone security co-operation, have reinforced the ambiguous nature of what a “Europeanized” vision for European security might look like, especially given long-standing loyalties to NATO. This affords states considerable margin for manoeuvrability in defining their security priorities, so long as they are seen as being broadly consistent. This article reassesses the appropriateness of the Europeanization concept and shows how Portugal has approached this strategic balancing act, supporting the development of the EU's CSDP whilst remaining loyal to NATO and seeking to develop security relations in the Lusophone world, achieving legitimacy by stressing complementarity and multilateralization in security co-operation.     

Press coverage of lone-actor terrorism in the UK and Denmark: shaping the reactions of the public,affected communities and copycat attackers

Following 9/11, Al-Qaeda-orchestrated plots were considered the greatest threat to Western security and sparked the coalition’s war on terror. Close to a decade later, the post-9/11 threat landscape had shifted significantly, leading then CIA-director Leon Panetta to describe “the lone-wolf strategy” as the main threat to the United States. Subsequent lone-actor attacks across the West, including the cities of London, Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Ottawa and Charleston, further entrenched perspectives of a transformed security landscape in the “after, after-9/11” world. The unique features of lone-actor terrorism, including the challenges of interdiction and potential of copycat attacks, mean that the media is likely to play a particularly important role in shaping the reactions of the public, affected communities and copycat attackers. This article presents findings from a content analysis of British and Danish newspaper reporting of lone-actor terrorism between January 2010 and February 2015. The study highlights that lone-actor terrorism is framed, with national variations, as a significant and increasing problem in both countries; that Islamist lone-actors are often represented as distinct from far-right lone-actors; and that some reporting, despite relatively limited amplification of specific terrorist messages, potentially aids lone-actors by detailing state vulnerabilities to attacks.     

Transatlantic cooperation on terrorism and Islamist radicalisation in Africa: the Franco-American axis

Transatlantic cooperation on security has a long history. In Africa, transatlantic cooperation on security is basically between France and the United States. This paper asks why the two former competitors in Africa started to cooperate and also why they are so willing to engage militarily. The central argument in this paper poses that France and the US cooperate because it is indispensable to both parties. To France, the cooperation is indispensable because the US is the only power with sufficient financial means and with sufficient air-lift capacity to transport French and African troops into conflict-ridden countries. To Washington, cooperation with Paris is indispensable because the French authorities have unique access to intelligence and knowledge about large parts of Africa. By applying a foreign policy analysis framework, the paper analyses how perceptions of decision-makers, the role of personality and leadership, the role of government institutions and political systems have impacted the relevant decisions. It is emphasised that the two different decision-making systems – the French “state dominated” and the American “society dominated” – produce the same result, namely collaboration. It suggests that the perception of a serious threat from terrorism and Islamist radicalisation overrules differences in decision-making systems.     

英国脱欧对欧美关系的影响

英国脱欧不仅是英国国内的重大政治事件和欧洲一体化发展的重要节点,也对欧美关系产生了重要影响。英国脱欧前在欧美关系中占据特殊地位,既是欧美沟通的重要桥梁,又能塑造欧盟发展方向以契合美国利益。英国脱欧深刻改变了欧盟,推动其内部力量变化和政策调整,也将改变欧美之间的互动方式,对欧美关系发展构成新的挑战。百年变局下欧美关系正经历深刻调整,而英国脱欧也成为这一过程中的重要内部变量。     

German policy in a strategic triangle: Berlin,Paris, Washington … and what about London?

The article presents the German view on the current stand and future perspectives of the transatlantic relationship. It points to the caesuras that have defined the US–German relationship since the end of the Cold War. It also details the German role in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and highlights the German discussion on its involvement in those wars. The historical strategic triangle of the US, Germany and France might develop into a Euro‐American ellipse to confront current global challenges, but, as of today, many hurdles remain, particularly the lack of a common vision and policy regarding the future political order of Europe. The article finally calls on the German government to continue its policy as a ‘civilian power’ and to repair its relations with the US after the Iraq war. International cooperation in multilateral institutions remains the main pillar of German foreign policy.     

A history of drones: moral(e) bombing and state terrorism

This article argues that an historical investigation of air power makes possible the critique of current regimes of drone surveillance and bombing as a practice of state terrorism. By identifying certain key themes regularly used in terrorism studies for the classification of violence as “terrorism”, this article shows that early air power theorists understood military aircraft as essentially instruments of terrorism. A central argument permeating these theorists’ conception of air power was that the military value of aviation lay in its capacity to target the enemy’s population and, by means of bombing, generate a significant “moral effect” – that is, a psychological effect against the morale of civilians. This strategic formula constituted a central component of British air control schemes during the interwar period, where terror bombing was deployed systematically in order to control and pacify colonial populations. In arguing that widespread and long-lasting terror remains an inalienable feature of air power, this article concludes with a call for a critique that accounts for the fact that current deployments of armed drones – for instance, the US “targeted killings” programme – effectively reproduce these historical and material conditions of terrorist violence.