Foreign Fighters and the EU Counterterrorism Policy: New Challenge, Old Problems

In this paper, I argue that while the phenomenon of foreign fighters – i.e. EU citizens leaving to fight in Syria and/or Iraq – represents a relatively new challenge for the EU-level efforts to combat terrorism, these efforts suffer from a number of old problems. Most notably, these include the following: 1) significant differences among Member States, including the salience and perceptions of the terrorist threat; 2) lack of information sharing and coordination challenges, 3) lack of political consensus and/or support for EU level measures, 4) lack of EU competence, 5) implementation gaps regarding already agreed measures and selective use of existing instruments, 6) an ongoing security and/or/vs. justice/ liberty debate. The paper will first examine how and why the issue foreign fighters became EU's top counterterrorism priority around mid-2013, when JHA Council stipulated 22 measures to address the problem in six priority areas. These measures will then be analyzed in order to identify the presence/absence of the aforementioned “old problems” of the EU counterterrorism policy. In the final section, plausible explanations for the persistence of old challenges in the EU counterterrorism policy will be explored.