Referenced but Not Linear?

Introduction

On 27 November 2015, the Slovak government, at an extraordinary session, “approved a package of anti-terrorism legislation” that consisted of amendments to fifteen legal acts, including the Constitution and the Criminal Code. The package was introduced two weeks after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris as a “response to the current security situation in Europe.” ¹

It is not unusual for governments to respond with legislative initiatives in the wake of profound acts of terrorism. For example, The European Union Counter-Terrorism Strategy came into force during the British presidency of the Council of the European Union, four months after the infamous 7/7 bombings in London, ² and the Slovak government is not unique in its reactive policy approach to the phenomenon of terrorism. However, its response was formulated while the Slovak Information Service, the country’s intelligence agency, detected “no specific security threats to Slovakia or involvement of Slovak citizens in terrorist activities abroad.” ³ Moreover, the legislative amendments were introduced in the aftermath of a terrorist incident abroad and not in Slovakia. Thus, a problematic situation arose when external events led a given government to react in a “one size fits all” manner to the threat of terrorism. At the same time, however, one could argue that in the wake of the Paris attacks, Slovakia effectively responded to the calls for Europe to “wake up, organize itself, and defend itself against the terrorist threat,” made by Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister. ⁴ What is more, a similar argument can be made about the new counterterrorist arrangements in other Central-Eastern European states, all member states of the EU and NATO.

Hungary and Poland are prime examples of such a Central-Eastern European approach to CT, where external events lead to a flurry of activity despite the almost non-existent terrorist threat. The former has just introduced a constitutional amendment that reads, a “terrorist threat as a sixth kind of state of emergency that could be announced by the government without consulting parliament in case of a terrorist attack or the significant probability of one.” Interestingly, this amendment was suggested against the backdrop of the Hungarian Counterterrorism Centre (TEK) and parliamentary defence committee publicly denying that Hungary is faced with a serious threat of terrorism. ⁵

Poland, on the other hand, has stopped short of introducing constitutional amendments and, although its security services agreed with the Slovak and Hungarian low threat assessments for Central-Eastern Europe, ⁶ moved to introduce its first ever “terrorism” legislation. By mid-2016, the relevant bill, originally promised by the government in the aftermath of the Paris attacks and dubbed an “anti-terrorism bill,” was still being debated in parliament. ⁷ Its preparation coincided with the hardening of the government’s rhetoric on internal security–related matters, for example, its rejection of the EU refugee relocation system due to the supposed risk of terrorism posed by what it perceives as inadequately verified refugees. ⁸ Thus, the refugee crisis, just like the terrorist attacks in Paris, an event unfolding outside Central-Eastern Europe, was used to justify the CT posture of some of the region’s countries.

This article contextualizes such seemingly robust Central-Eastern European reactions to terrorist events in Western Europe, whilst examining the difference between how counterterrorism in Central-Eastern Europe looks in theory and how it works in practice. As the phenomenon of CT is thoroughly under-researched, with most of the discipline of terrorism studies focusing on researching terrorism, ⁹ and the existing CT research oriented towards Western European countries, ¹⁰ this article will address a serious gap in the academic literature on CT. It will also broaden the field of available case study countries for future CT-oriented research by comparatively analysing the CT reality of countries that are not directly threatened by terrorism, and highlighting the difficulties of organising a given country’s CT in conditions with hardly any terrorism. It will add to Javier Argomaniz’s depiction of a “coordinator nightmare,” coined while describing CT at the EU level, ¹¹ and underline another difficulty confronting those tasked with bringing about a pan-European understanding of terrorism and effective methods of countering it: an effective West–East or old EU–new EU divide. This article thus constitutes the first comparative study that focuses solely on CT-related issues of the post-2004 EU entrants, and one of very first assessing CT developments in post-communist Europe available in English. ¹²

Theory and Methodology

This article will show that the Central-Eastern European approaches to CT are not developed in a vacuum. They are the end result of countries of the region learning from someone, albeit in a peculiar manner. As will be demonstrated, the process of learning is event driven and characterised by short outbursts or flurries of activity. It is developed in response to the EU’s attempt to provide its Members with a clear-cut strategy for a comprehensive approach to CT—as formulated in its aforementioned CT Strategy from 2005. ¹³ Unfortunately, the EU—a seeming CT standard bearer—is only, as was admitted by its Counterterrorism Coordinator (CTC), responsible for less than 10 percent of CT activities undertaken by the 28 member states. They either singlehandedly or in a bilateral or multilateral fashion are in the “driver’s seat” as far as EU internal security in general and CT in particular are concerned. ¹⁴ This allows some of its members to develop a haphazard approach to the aforementioned Strategy and its contents as they effectively cherry-pick its elements while developing their own, distinct CT approach, which has been far from comprehensive. They stand accused of neglecting the preventive aspects of CT, ¹⁵ pushed to the front in the Strategy—itself an element of an EU “roadmap” (alongside the 2001 Action Plan on the Fight Against Terrorism) for CT measures, ¹⁶ but this omission is by far not the only peculiarity in Central-Eastern European CT responses. It is the aim of this article to unmask these and present a comprehensive and comparative picture of CT in the region.

The article’s theoretical underpinnings are provided by Mariya. I. Omelicheva’s theory of “reference groups,” which she developed while studying Central Asian countries, ¹⁷ and by Frank Foley’s linear approach to CT, as presented in his comparative study of British and French CT arrangements. ¹⁸ The former described CT developments in Central Asia and concluded that the international setting strongly influences the local governments’ understanding of terrorist threat and their policy responses. In short, Central Asians looked for counsel and inspiration from their “reference groups” and copied some of the practices developed by their “referees” in order to win the support of certain social groups, that is, international organisations they belong to (the Commonwealth of Independent States, Collective Security Treaty Organization, and Shanghai Cooperation Organization) or individual and stronger partners (the United States, Russia, China). Foley’s theory perceives the British and the French CT policy and practice formulation as a linear development originating from “threat perceptions” that subsequently draws both of these countries towards development of a set of “legacies” in terms of norms and institutional and organisational routines. It is through these “legacies” that the British and the French decision makers filter their original “threat perception” and consequently develop a given CT practice and reality. ¹⁹

Both of the aforementioned theories are useful while deciphering how CT in Central-Eastern Europe looks in theory and how it works in practice. As will transpire, Omelicheva’s approach is applicable to new EU entrants who seek counsel and inspiration from their “reference groups” (Western European EU Member States or alternatively, but far less often, the United States). In short, they copy some but not all of the practices developed by their Western European “reference” neighbours, who are threatened by terrorism but often fail to study the applicability and usefulness of Western solutions in relation to their untested (due to the low terrorist threat) CT arrangements. This is evident when one studies the rationale behind Poland’s aforementioned “terrorism” bill—the interior ministry openly references the jihadist terrorist attacks from 2015 and 2016 that took place outside Poland as justification for the proposed “anti-terrorist” legislative changes. ²⁰ Such an approach adds an additional, but clearly imported, urgency to the country’s CT posture and undermines any sense of linearity in its development, as theorised by Foley. Consequently, CT norms and routines are developed in a haphazard manner, by a way of “referencing,” or literally importing them, from the Western allies and neighbours. Consequently, hardly any process of filtering low-key “perception” through underdeveloped “legacies” actually takes place in the region, and local CT is as such in a rather unimpressive state. This article will inform the understanding of the intra-European divide on CT, and enhance the appreciation of the struggles Central-Eastern Europeans face while developing routines for countering a seemingly omnipresent but also distant security threat.

The depiction of this copy-paste mentality and “referencing” one’s CT arrangements vis-à-vis those of allies, friends, and neighbours will be achieved by a comparative study of eight Central-Eastern European cases, that is, post-communist, NATO, and EU member states that also belong to the Schengen Area: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. These will be jointly referred to in this article as “Central Europe,” as distinct from “Western Europe” (understood here as consisting of the “old,” pre-2004, EU Member States) or “Eastern Europe” (non-NATO and non-EU Eastern European, post-Soviet states). Following the approach of Michael Karlsson’s comparative study of CT institutions in Northern Europe, the cases have been chosen because of their similarity (most similar case design). ²¹ Their socio-political and economic realities, and historical experiences, bear out far more similarities than differences, or, in methodological terms, one would struggle to present a list of variables (either dependent or independent) that could offer major deviations between the chosen countries. Thus, the threat of “travelling problem” (comparison of issues that are not really similar) and concept stretching while attempting to be more inclusive in relation to one’s case studies is minimised in this work. ²²

The similarities of the case studies of CT arrangements, and their preference for “referencing” activities, will be demonstrated via the means of thematic analysis of qualitative Central European CT-related data from 2001 (the beginning of the so-called global war on terror [GWOT] and the symbolic beginning of CT in Central Europe) to 2014 (the termination of the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, mission in Afghanistan). These data are derived from documents (security strategies, military strategies, defence strategies), officials’ statements, interviews and pronouncements on the issue, newspaper and academic articles, as well as sixty semistructured interviews conducted with high-ranking CT officials and experts from Central Europe and international organisations based in Brussels (see endnotes for more on the interviewees’ backgrounds and careers). The current author analysed the collected data, and while performing this process, similarities within the developed data set came to light. ²³ These allowed for an inductive development of patterns, which were then coded, and their repetition across the data set led to the establishment of themes. ²⁴ The author produced five themes related to CT routines (Foley’s second stage in linear CT development) in Central Europe that bind the eight cases studied: presenting non-CT activities as CT, “VIP” CT, improvisation and tiredness in CT, “consumer” and not “provider” CT, external milestone–based CT. In his view, they constitute the understudied CT reality in this part of the continent—and the final element of Foley’s linear approach to CT development.

The developed themes focused on issues binding together the eight cases studied in the realm of CT “legacies”, since the author could hardly observe any data patterns underlining major CT differences between the new EU entrants. It is the current author’s theory that this state of affairs is the net result of the existence of relatively little historical, socio-political, and economic differences amongst the cases studied, and the fact that they all “reference” CT solutions in a nonsystematic fashion from the same sources—their Western peers. The elaboration of the aforementioned themes will be preceded by a presentation of how Central Europe struggled to develop a threat perception vis-à-vis terrorism, and where the origins of their haphazard construction of CT norms and routines (or “legacies”) lay. Thus, the article’s next section will address the first element of Foley’s CT-related linearity, and an intellectual justification for the subsequent nonsystematic development of CT “legacies,” through Omelicheva’s “referencing,” which are then thematically presented in the later part of this study.

Threat Perception and Sources of CT “Legacies” in Central Europe

Historically, some of the new EU Member States had never actually been involved in robust CT but rather in fomenting terrorism or, more accurately, helping the USSR foment terrorism in Western Europe. Thus, “training facilities” ²⁵ for Middle Eastern terrorist groups or shelter for the likes of Carlos the Jackal were available within the territories of some of Moscow’s satellite regimes like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, or Hungary. ²⁶ Simultaneously, “a fairly professional culture of surveillance” with “huge machinery, [and] large staff” acted as an authoritarian and potential CT arrangement. ²⁷ In such conditions, a violent terrorist campaign on behalf of anti-state organisations was unlikely to develop.

Interestingly, the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union both altered and simultaneously strengthened the CT “legacy” developed in Central Europe between the 1940s and the early 1990s. This alteration was the result of the fact that the post-Soviet satellite states or former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania dismantled the surveillance machinery and would not use the previous, repressive, and extrajudicial tools to counter political dissent, sometimes terrorist in nature: “we [Estonia] had . . . Interfront—mainly Russian, and not soldiers but Russians with military training, no longer in the army. In the 1990s they organized 3 explosions in Estonia. . . . It came out later that they got money, training and explosives from the Soviet army. [Thus] we have some experience with state supported terrorism. [. . . Then] in the middle of the 1990s we had an imported phenomenon, Russian extremist groups. Nicknames—Limonovians [from Eduard Limonov, their leader], National-Bolsheviks, and Barkashovians [from Alexander Barkashov, their leader]. Both tried to recruit . . . but weren’t successful at all.” ²⁸

This altering and restrained CT approach, however, developing in tandem with the strengthening of other elements of the pre-1989 CT “legacy,” saw the Central-Eastern European authorities embrace the already well-grounded notion of this part of Europe as relatively unthreatened by terrorism. In the past, such thinking was derived from the successes of surveillance machinery that crushed any potential dissent, but after 1989 it was based on the assumption of the region’s unattractiveness to terrorism or terrorists. The short-sightedness of this approach has already been exposed by Miroslav Mareš, who rightly questioned Central Europe’s status as a “terrorism-free zone” while detailing non-kinetic, logistics-related activities perpetrated by terrorist groups in the region. ²⁹ Nonetheless, hardly any terrorist violence took place in Central Eastern Europe—Edwin Bakker was able to establish that the so-called EU10, the ten new Member States that joined the EU on 1 May 2004 (including the eight cases studied for this article), saw less than 3 percent of the total numbers of terrorist related incidents and fatalities in the whole of the EU. ³⁰ What is more, 86 out of the 146 terrorist incidents (and 30 out of the 35 fatalities) recorded in the EU10 between 1968 and 2005 took place in Cyprus and Malta, the smallest and the only non-Central European states among the 2004 entrants. ³¹ Since then the situation has not, thankfully, changed much for the Central Europeans as is evident in Europol produced TE-SAT reports (EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report): very few arrests, plots, or convictions are reported by the new EU entrants. ³² Such conditions and results seem to validate the approach that the Central-Eastern European authorities chose in relation to the CT “legacy” they inherited from their communist predecessors—reform (alteration) with a high dose of continuation.

After the seminal events of 9/11 and EU accession on 1 May 2004, Central Europeans developed some CT capabilities to combat the terrorist threat, which is admittedly quantitatively different from that faced in Western Europe. ³³ Additionally, key policy documents of the Western European security and political structures that the Central Europeans aspired to join after 1989 directly obliged them to develop their CT infrastructure, and effectively use their Western allies’ experiences as departure points. For example, NATO’s 1999 Strategic Concept ³⁴ listed “terrorism” as the first “risk of a wider nature” and the 2003 European Security Strategy, ³⁵ the EU’s comprehensive document on security, named it a top “key threat.” Consequently, no (new) member of either NATO or the EU could have neglected the threat of terrorism in its security arrangements. Moreover, a certain format of organising one’s CT was also imposed upon all of the EU Member States via the EU Counter-Terrorism Strategy, regardless of the threat level to a given a country or the threat perception of that county’s authorities. ³⁶

In such conditions, the Central European and new Member States of the EU (and NATO) were transforming their previously underdeveloped CT arrangements and in the reality of GWOT tended to “reference” their security discourse to that of their Western allies. Because of GWOT, the United States became Central-Eastern Europe’s first reference point in their CT build-ups. Thus, in October 2001, Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, first felt obliged—against the backdrop of a very low terrorist threat in Poland—to state that his country would “never allow terrorist organisations to operate on its territory.” ³⁷ Subsequently, he organised a “Countering Terrorism Summit” during which sixteen Central, Eastern, and Southern-Eastern European heads of state pledged to counter terrorism and spoke via videolink with the US president. ³⁸ Such initiatives were followed by Central-Eastern European offers of troop contributions to GWOT in the form of deploying military contingents to Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States was quick to capitalize on their new allies’ eagerness to develop an interest in CT—it is now widely accepted that some of the Central-Eastern European states housed CIA “black sites” on their territories, with Poland allegedly receiving a $15 million payment in exchange. ³⁹ In tandem with such alleged activities, the United States invested in building the capacity of the region’s special forces, which were then used in CT and counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan. ⁴⁰

The Central-Eastern European US-first approach to CT was also immediately reflected in strategic documents on the security of Central European states, in which terrorism is referred to or listed in Hungary as a top “global challenge,” ⁴¹ in Poland as the “most important danger amongst threats to the international system and the security of individual states” ⁴² or the “most obvious form of threat to national security,” ⁴³ and in Lithuania as “a distinguishing feature of the current security environment.” ⁴⁴ This prominence awarded to terrorism in the Central European security mix upset some commentators, who were unhappy that these documents “copy everything that is in [the] EU and NATO documents.” ⁴⁵ They have also been criticised for using “the same legitimacy, the same arguments as the U.S. used. We pick it up, our national interest is externally driven, externally constructed.” ⁴⁶ Thus Central European “reference groups,” effectively the “social groups” or alliances and bodies the states wished to join, heavily influence the case study countries’ decisions on CT development. ⁴⁷ In short, if leading members of these external groups consider terrorism a more serious threat than the less prominent or aspiring Central Europeans, the latter are likely to at least rhetorically follow the example of senior members of organisations such as NATO and the EU. ⁴⁸

Interestingly, the spectacular Al-Qaeda attacks in Europe from 2004 and 2005 coincided with the United States’ waning allure as a CT reference point for Central-Eastern Europeans. The threat was suddenly closer to home, but after the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it no longer was regarded as a defining security and foreign policy issue by the new EU and NATO members. Instead, the controversies associated with GWOT allowed Central-Eastern Europeans to embrace a more Eurocentric approach to CT and relegate terrorism to a security matter best addressed by the actions of police forces or security services. The police and security personnel, however, had to co-operate mostly with their neighbouring Western European EU equivalents. At the same time, however, Central and Eastern Europeans began a conscious effort to “externalise” the threat of terrorism and stress its alien, distant, and exotic character; for example, Lithuania attempted to excuse the absence of terrorist attacks on its soil with the country’s “historical heritage [ . . . which does not] provide conditions for the formation of a broad domestic network of terrorism.” ⁴⁹ Such rhetoric contradicted the earlier Baltic attempts to play up the notion of “terrorism” or effectively the “terror experience” while under the yoke of the Soviet Union. ⁵⁰ This approach was originally utilised to offer what was seen as crucial background for giving their countries a natural ticket into the world of global CT or the possibility to present their increased interest in combating terrorism as one of the entry vehicles into NATO. ⁵¹

Other Central European countries followed Lithuania’s practice, ⁵² and the case of the Czech Republic offers the most striking example of neglecting terrorism in one’s security mix. In 2003, terrorism, alongside the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, was seen as two of “the most serious threats of our times.” ⁵³ However, by 2012, it was not present in the country’s Defence Strategy. ⁵⁴ Such a de-prioritisation of terrorism as security threat was also reflected in comments offered to the author by the interviewees, CT practitioners from the region, who stated that “we do not have any trigger issues for terrorism,” ⁵⁵ “the threat is low and perception [of the threat] is very low,” ⁵⁶ or that “the threat is minimal.” ⁵⁷

The oscillating “threat perception” (Foley’s first linear stage of CT construction)—ranging from externally influenced and driven flurry of activity to an honest admission of “the threat is low”—paved the way for an improvised and haphazard at best and mismanaged at worst Central-Eastern European construction of “legacies,” that is, norms, organisational routines, and procedures governing a given CT system (Foley’s second stage of CT construction), influenced more by European experiences and increasingly less by input from the United States. ⁵⁸ The next section of this article comparatively and thematically analyses these “legacies”—routines that are responsible for the existing state of CT reality in the case studies (Foley’s third, and final, stage of CT construction).

CT Reality in Central Europe

To say that CT is an area in which things look different on paper and in practice would be an understatement, and is most probably true for all countries of the world, not just the eight case studies discussed in this article. CT practitioners, however, should do their utmost to bridge the gap between the two in order to properly defend their countries from the terrorist threat. The following thematic analysis of the CT practice in the region, however, reinforces the centrality of “referencing” externally driven activities, not rooted in local perception of the threat, to CT efforts. The analysis consists of five elements, presenting the key components of CT reality for Central European countries: presenting non-CT activities as CT, “VIP” CT, improvisation and tiredness in CT, “consumer” and not “provider” CT, external milestone–based CT.

Conclusions

Throughout this article, the author has underlined the centrality of the “reference group” approach, as developed by Omelicheva, to Central European CT efforts. At the same time, the article emphasised the non-linear attitude to CT development in the region which differs from that of France and the United Kingdom—leading CT “providers” in Western Europe, and Foley’s case studies. The findings of this article provide an empirical basis for Jörg Monar’s argument about “a particularly notable difference between threat perceptions in the 15 ‘old’ [EU] member states . . . and the 10 ‘new’ member states . . . ”—including the cases discussed in the current article, and validate his central argument on EU members’ preference for “cooperation” and “coordination” over “integration” of their CT responses. ¹¹⁵ While coordinating and cooperating and not integrating as the existing EU would have preferred, some of the new members reference/borrow/copy and paste or import some aspects of CT but refrain from active engagement vis-à-vis others. This puts their policies squarely in line with the policies and practices of the older EU member states. The EU, as Oldrich Bureš explained in 2011, is unable to alter this state of affairs as it is often no more than a “paper tiger” as far as CT is concerned. ¹¹⁶ Three years later, he and other authors expanded on this point and stressed that in the meantime the EU had “bureaucratically developed” and gained “recognition and visibility” as a CT actor in its own right but had not necessarily successfully made “a direct and substantial contribution to a stronger counter-terror response in practice.” ¹¹⁷ Consequently, its CT continues to be “subsidiary” to that of the member states, which, as was shown, not only differ in their “threat perception” but also in their CT “legacy” development process. ¹¹⁸ This leads to the development of various mutations of the end product - a CT reality which, as was mentioned earlier, functions at different speeds. Of course, the development of CT at the EU level to an extent mollifies the “legacy” gap amongst EU Member States but one could hardly rely solely on importing CT norms, routines, solutions, and milestones while constructing a given state response to the threat of terrorism. Nonetheless, Central Europeans strive to at least notionally aspire to standards set by their “reference groups,” organisations and networks of states that act as the former’s economic, political, and civilizational points of reference and role models. This practice, aimed at reducing intra-EU CT differences, exposes Central European CT weaknesses as they improvise, pretend, or copy and paste terrorism-oriented solutions from the broader West. Moreover, these solutions and practices are organised to thwart a threat that is mostly external in character, and consequently, they could prove of little use in Central European conditions. Unfortunately, admitting this is not, at least for the time being, an option as Central Europeans attempt “to speed up from 30km to 300km” ¹¹⁹ while, as was shown, performing a lot of CT-related activities—“for different reasons, very diverse from what the sole reason [actual threat level] should have been.” ¹²⁰

When government officials and national experts are unwilling to publicly disassociate themselves from “one size fits all” CT solutions, the job of critically evaluating and comparing the CT systems of individual EU Member States in order to ascertain their potential irrelevances and absurdities falls to academics. As demonstrated above, they have already detected different threat perceptions in the EU and theorised the notion of “reference group” and linear approaches in relation to CT. A new niche in terrorism and comparative studies appears, however, as in-depth, qualitative research focusing on national case studies would illuminate the need for a diversified CT in the broader West, Europe, or the EU. Such research could also have serious policy implications and relevance as organisations like the EU might then become more receptive to the notion of a bottom–up European or EU CT that would take into the account the diversity of practices, experiences, and solutions of individual Member States. In short, for Central Europeans this could amount to a steady dismantlement of copy-and-paste solutions in relation to CT as they would no longer need to pretend or improvise and could openly, and without any shame, own up to their shortcomings and deficiencies.