Countering Foreign Fighters by European Cooperation - The Importance of the Logic of Practicality

Terrorism and radicalization rank high on the political agenda of the European Union. The Dutch EU-Presidency hosted a high-level international conference on fighting ISIS in the beginning of January 2016, underlining the importance of a joint EU-approach towards foreign fighters and other terrorism-related topics. The question however remains what exactly the role of the European Union could and should be in dealing with the multi-facetted phenomenon of foreign fighters. Current manifestations of terrorism are a cross-national if not truly global phenomenon that does not stop at the external border of the EU let alone at the borders between EU member states as a number of recent attacks have clearly shown. This requires cross-border cooperation and the European Union is the logical political entity that can help foster such cooperation. At the same time, there is a risk in calling upon the EU to deal with the current terrorist threat. Quite often, calls upon ‘Brussels’ to do more are based on the idea that the EU would be in a better position to deal with terrorism than individual member states and that the ‘Europeanization’ of the fight against terrorism would lead to more effective counterterrorism policies. This assumption is not based on any evidence. In fact, it seems highly unlikely that a ‘Europeanization’ of counterterrorism will make Europeans more safe from terrorism. In this paper we will focus on five factors that explain the need for a pragmatic, modest and tailor-made approach to counterterrorism at the European level. These factors are: the dynamics of intelligence and security services; the relationship between these services and law enforcement; the convergence of internal and external security; the fragmentation of counterterrorism policies; and the diversity of the terrorist threat in Europe and the different national contexts. These factors are not new; they reflect long-standing contradictions and deficiencies in the EU counterterrorist approach partly related to the undetermined ‘end-state’ of the European project and partly related to the political sensitivity of security policies. They however also reflect the tension between the administrative-political logic and dynamics of the European Union and the ‘logic of practicality’ of security professionals. In this paper it will be argued that the EU should follow the ‘logic of practicality’, which emphasizes the importance of common-sense, practical knowledge and self-evidence in the daily business of actors operating in the international theatre. Practice theory tries to do justice to the practical nature of action by rooting human activity in a way that is not being reduced or explained at forehand by concepts or theories. If we take the logic of practicality serious, we have to give more weight to what is happening in security networks and assemblages in order to understand European counterterrorism policies rather than to continue relying on approaches that centre around institutions, treaties, policymakers and policies.