While the role and responsibilities of the counterterrorism coordinator created in 2004 were broad in scope and also much in flux over the first few years,44 it is clear that the coordinator still lacks the authority to counter the bureaucratic EU system or control member states’ activities. The position itself was a compromise between smaller member states who favored an EU intelligence agency and the larger members, who vetoed the idea.45 At the operational level, a good argument can be made that the EU resembles much of a paper tiger as well.46 The EU law enforcement organization Europol lacks executive authorities to this day.47 Due to member states’ reservations about giving up sovereignty and lacking trust in Europol capacities,48 reforms directed at strengthening cooperation between security agencies thus far have focused on increasing informationsharing capacities through the voluntary use of common databases and joint terrorism analysis.49 Concerns about the lack of information sharing are voiced periodically, also in the context of the EU Intelligence Analysis Centre, which became part of the External Action Service in 2011.50 While progress has arguably been made since 9/11, the EU remains on the sidelines of day-to-day operational counterterrorism matters. Cooperation is often based on bi- or multilateral arrangements between countries or informal groups and clubs outside the EU.51
The 9/11 Baseline
The 9/11 events mark the starting point of the baseline assessment for all four countries. While the three European states have extensive experience with varying kinds of domestic terrorism52 and these experiences resulted in responses that inform some of their current counterterrorism approaches, they have also reassessed these “older” institutional arrangements and policies or simply came up with new ones. Networked Jihadi suicide terrorism differs from the terrorism the three European countries experienced in the past. Regardless of prior experiences, all three states did introduce quite a few new policies and/or institutions to counter the new threats after 9/11. Further recognizing that some of their policy inheritances and experiences may have affected French, British, and German outcomes, the countries’ approaches are not judged by the number, quality, or extremeness of their reforms. Rather, the focus is on the question of what the nature and extent of the reforms reveal about the workings of government structures.
Even though European states did not suffer an attack on 9/11, Jihadi terrorism is viewed as a substantial security threat in all four countries since 9/11.53 The number of casualties and the way the attacks were executed showed a new threat demanding new methods and answers. As counterterrorism is a dynamic process and terrorists learn to adapt, all four governments have continuously scrutinized and adjusted their own processes and methods accordingly, as well as analyzed trends and tools employed by terrorist networks to prevent future attacks and weaken terrorist logistical and operational structures.
Indeed, the events of 9/11 were such a sudden and traumatic shock that all states moved swiftly to improve their ability to meet the dangers posed by Jihadist terrorist networks. Because their responses have been carried out within an existing governmental structure, a comparison of national responses can reveal how differing structures affected countries’ responses—in areas where there were some or no existing policies or institutions in place.
Defining Domestic Counterterrorism
I define domestic counterterrorism in terms of its key institutional and operational features.54 This focus is not accidental. Reflecting a need to counter increasingly transnational terrorist networks and in an effort to prevent Jihadi-style suicide terrorism, states after 9/11 especially targeted domestic institutional designs and policies to improve (1) informationsharing within the counterterrorism community, (2) interagency coordination among counterterrorism services, and (3) intelligence collection and analysis capacities.
In this context, a few more definitions are in order. The literature I discuss throughout this book uses the terms structural, institutional, and organizational often interchangeably. I, however, reserve the terms government structures and structural for executive and legislative (or judicial) branches of government, as well as the processes and dynamics between them. While these structures mostly affect horizontal relationships, in federal systems they may also run vertically, as there are separate federal, state, and local government levels. By implication, my references to institutions, organizations, and agencies relate to substructural units or bureaucracies, such as government departments, ministries, and agencies. The term “interagency” describes horizontal relationships, either between departments and ministries at the strategic, high policy level or among security agencies at the more tactical, operational level.
Measuring Government Structures
This book measures, compares, and contrasts the effect of structures and their policy outcomes in a cross-national analysis of four different parliamentary and presidential democracies. Toward this end, I look at four indicators across all four countries to determine whether and how differing structures impede or facilitate counterterrorism policy decision-making. The four empirical measures include (1) speed of response (how soon did countries respond? How long did decision-making processes take?); (2) decision-making per executive order or with congressional/parliamentary approval (the number of veto points encountered in the decision-making process likely has an impact on the scope and nature of agreed-upon measures); (3) level of public scrutiny and debate (whether the process allowed for an open debate, public hearings, or post-legislative scrutiny rather than secret and/or emergency procedures determines how far checks and balances were upheld); and (4) extent and nature of reforms (what was the focus, nature, and scope of the policy and institutional reforms? Did they affect the balance between executive, legislative, or judicial branches?)
The Case Study Method—Why Focus on Germany, Britain, and France?
The book is in the tradition of the method employed by other major comparative works on decision-making.55 The case study approach yields the most nuanced and detailed approach to identifying the defining elements of national security policy processes, the often only fine differences between the responses, as well as the factors driving reforms. As government structures are only one of multiple other possible reform drivers, detailed case studies allow for the kind of qualitative analysis needed for the careful weighing and “weeding out” of alternative explanations. The most prominent of these include bureaucratic interests, political cultures, policy inheritances, threat perceptions, political conditions, and multilateral obligations. Moreover, the case study approach not only facilitates comparisons between the two presidential systems, the two parliamentary systems, the two unitary, and the two federal systems, but it allows comparisons across pairs: parliamentary versus presidential and unitary versus federal.
The cases are not selected at random but represent the most important U.S. NATO allies and the three most populous and powerful countries in Europe. The focus is thus deliberately on selected liberal democracies, as illiberal regimes, like Russia, do not hold lessons for U.S. practices. Understanding what reforms have been formulated in these three Western European countries, and also why, should facilitate international cooperation in general and also help determine whether some of the best practices could be replicated in the United States or elsewhere.
The four cases thus meet common criteria for strong case studies:56 (1) they are data-rich cases; (2) they have a range of values on the independent variable “government structures,” which includes varying degrees and combinations of “stronger” fusion-of-powers and unitary systems as well as “weaker” separation-of-powers and federal systems; (3) they involve contemporary policy concerns, as there are numerous other Western countries that are affected by similar challenges; (4) they include prototypical background characteristics, as generic government systems feature either or both parliamentary or presidential characteristics and unitary or federal organization; (5) they are well matched for controlled cross-case comparison, as countries’ counterterrorism responses were formulated in response to the same threat and compared over the same time period; (6) at least two of the cases are outlier cases as, for example, Kenneth Waltz’s findings would predict that counterterrorism responses in parliamentary systems