Miscellaneous
| AT | Antiterrorism |
| CT | Counterterrorism |
| ECHR | European Convention on Human Rights |
| ECJ | European Court of Justice |
| EU | European Union |
| UN | United Nations |
Introduction
The post-9/11 era continues to raise questions about how to manage transnational security threats directed against Western liberal democracies like the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and France. As Jihadi terrorism has been catapulted to the forefront of states’ security agendas, national governments have had to find new political and legal instruments to detect and counter these threats. This book posits that the nature of countries’ responses is shaped by the particular governmental framework and process within which counterterrorism measures are decided. Understanding the nature, scope, and trends of national decision-making processes in Western democracies is imperative to identifying new mechanisms for containing transnational terrorist networks beyond national borders.
The purpose of this book is to examine how political structures, both horizontal and vertical, affect processes and policy outcomes in liberal democracies. In particular, it tries to understand counterterrorism responses in each of four countries by examining variations among presidential and parliamentary systems and various degrees of federalization and centralization in the United States (presidential and federal), France (semipresidential and unitary), Great Britain (parliamentary and unitary), and Germany (parliamentary and federal). The two central research questions this book focuses on are how government structures influence counterterrorism policies in these Western democracies and how similar or different the responses have been on both sides of the Atlantic.
The examination of government structures places this book at the center of an ongoing debate about the domestic sources of foreign policy/national security. Specifically, scholars of world politics disagree about the level of analysis in foreign policy/national security decision-making processes. One school of thought has focused on how different domestic governmental structures produce variations in decision-making processes and the policy output.1 Other scholars over the past forty-five years have shifted their focus from state level analyses to organizations and individual decision-makers. The latter approach stresses the importance of the perceptions and motivations of decision-makers, bureaucracies, and organizations.2 Structural proponents, by contrast, place particular importance on the question of how executive and legislative branches stand in relation to each other, and (in federal systems) to lower levels of government, and how power is allocated within the various branches and levels of government.
Decision-making works since 9/11 have used a bureaucratic or organizational perspective to explain counterterrorism outcomes. There is no current book available that measures and compares structural effects on decision-making in the national security arena after 9/11. This book is designed to fill this gap in the literature and contribute to the ongoing debate about the domestic sources of foreign policy/national security decision-making. I further argue that the bureaucratic focus does not suffice to explain reform outcomes, precisely because it cannot account for the structural underpinnings that shape policy-making processes. The transnational nature of the challenge makes the focus on government structures all the more imperative. Transnational terrorist networks not only transcend international borders but also go beyond jurisdictions and stove-piped hierarchies. While counterterrorism responses include measures designed to debilitate terrorist networks directly, states also have to find ways to complement traditional vertical organization and communication lines with more flexible, networked interactions. Governments have introduced new information-sharing policies and institutional arrangements so that government hierarchies (intelligence and law enforcement agencies, among others) on all levels can be better linked to detect and prevent terrorist activities at home and abroad.3 In some instances, governments reorganized and attempted to strengthen the coordination of structures and processes within their own executive and legislative branches. While reorganization needs can be and have also been addressed at the bureaucratic level, the changes in the security policy realm have been so fundamental (as they often affect the traditional balance between security and civil liberties) that they involve legislative actions in all Western democracies. For example, all governments have shifted from mostly reactive to more preventive law enforcement approaches, broadened data collection, created new partnerships between intelligence and law enforcement services, and begun breaking down other long-established foreign-domestic or executive-judicial divides.
Beyond this primary purpose, this book contributes to a debate within the structural school. Ever since Charles de Secondat Montesquieu formulated the theory of the separation of executive, legislative, and judicative powers, the members of this school have argued about the most efficient and effective ways of translating the principle into government structures. In Montesquieu’s view, the interlocking branches of the British constitution embodied his ideal, as executive power is checked by its dependence on legislative support. Ironically, the principle of checks and balances had the most visible influence on the American framers, who adopted it as the core of the U.S. presidential separation of powers system. With specific reference to the British system, James Madison warned about the “danger from legislative usurpations; which by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.”4 Like Montesquieu, British journalist Walter Bagehot in the nineteenth century advocated the merits of the centralized British government, contrasting it to the American presidential system with its “many sovereign authorities” and the hope “that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.”5 Following Alexis de Tocqueville’s line of argument, American power-sharing government structures are particularly ill-equipped to “fix on one plan and follow it through with persistence” and are “not capable of devising secret measures” in the foreign policy realm.6 Indeed, in the longstanding debate between advocates of parliamentary and presidential systems, the shortcomings of the U.S. separation of powers system are typically taken for granted. On the domestic stage, so the critics claim, the fragmentation of power leads to stalemate and gridlock—as the number of decision-makers increases, buck-passing is more common than consensus-building and policy-making.7 Because of the lack of centralized power, the argument continues, the U.S. government finds it difficult to follow a coherent course in the foreign policy arena and often cannot operate with the speed and resolve needed to face international challenges.8
However, contemporary literature on foreign policy/national security decision-making lacks a systematic analysis of countries’ varying parliamentary and presidential designs and their effects on policymaking capabilities and outcomes.9 One reason for this lack of systematic analysis is that the discussion has frequently centered on the comparison of Anglo-Saxon government attributes. To this day, “the British party government model serves as the implicit, if unattainable, ideal for many critics of existing American political institutions.”10 The study of reorganization à la Britain has not been limited to the scholarly realm. Evaluating the British war cabinet experience during World Wars I and II, and the Committee of Imperial Defense in particular, the Eberstadt Report of 1945 noted that