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Is Europe Soft on Terrorism?
Bruce Hoffman
Foreign Policy
, No. 115. (Summer, 1999), pp. 62-76.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0015-7228%28199922%290%3A115%3C62%3AIESOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C
Foreign Policy
is currently published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ceip.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgSun Jul 1 21:18:38 2007
 
Is
Europe
Soft
on
Terrorism?
by
Bruce
HofJman
M
adeleine Albright made no effort to hideher frustration. Testifying before Con-gress, the secretary of state offered apoint-by-point account of America& atest initiatives
to combat international terrorism. She spoke of how U.S.-led peaceefforts had resulted in a decline in political violence in NorthernIreland. She described the expansion of the U.S. Anti-TerrorismTraining Assistance Program, designed to support law enforcementagencies in more than
90
countries. And she touched upon the needto control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.But before too long, Albright was compelled to bring up the subjectof Abdullah Ocalan. By all reasoning, the arrest of the Kurdish terroristleader should have been an open and shut case
in
America's war againstterrorism. The State Department had been unambiguous in classifyingthe Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),which Ocalan heads, as a terroristorganization and therefore Ocalan himself as a terrorist. As a result, theAmericans reportedly pressured Syria, onTurkey's behalf, to expel the
PKK
leader last October so that he could be apprehended and stand trial.But when Ocalan ended up in Europe, neither the Italian nor Ger-man governments took advantage of opportunities they had either toprosecute or extradite him to Turkey. Instead, Ocalan was finally
BR
u
c
E
H
o
F
FM
A
N
is author of
Inside Terrorism
(New York: Columbia UniversityPress,
1998)
and director of
the
Washington office of the
RAND
corporation.
 
Hoffman
plucked from his refuge in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi by a team ofTurkish commandos reportedly following a tip from U.S. intelligence.
"I
was very disappointed," Albright told Congress, "that Germanyfailed to make good on the recent opportunity to prosecute AbdullahOcalan
. . .
and that Italy and Turkey were unable to find an alterna-tive way to ensure he was brought to justice. Instead of determination,this opportunity was greeted with handwringing and vacillation."Implicit in Albright's message was a warning against a return to pat-terns of behavior that prevailed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, whenEurope, fearful of potential reprisals, seemed more inclined to providea safe haven for international terrorists than to seek their apprehen-sion. Indeed, the frustration over the Ocalan affair taps into a growingirritation with Europe's seeming failure to counter the threat of terror-ism with the same level of commitment as the United States. In Wash-ington, Osama bin Laden, "bioterror," "cyberhackers," and "homelanddefense" are topics of the day. But when Europeans discuss terrorism,improved trade relations with Iran, mounting fatigue over the sanc-tions imposed on Libya, and a general determination to put the entireOcalan affair behind them seem to dominate the agenda. If anything,European integration has raised further concerns about the continent'sresolve. So far, Europe has yet to demonstrate the ability to sublimatenational interests to common foreign-policy and security goals outsidethe confines of
NATO.
And Europe faces the challenge of developing acooperative apparatus for dealing with transnational terrorism as theborders within the continent rapidly erode.But as tempting as it may be to compare-and hence perhaps crit-icize reflexively-Europe's generally softer approach to terrorism withAmerica's typically more hard-line stance, a closer examination sug-gests that Europe is not so much "soft" on terrorism as it is misunder-stood. Although the United States views counterterrorism as a globalwar that needs to be fought on all fronts, Europeans tend to give toppriority to combating terrorism that affects them directly at home.Within their own borders, Europeans are implementing joint-counterterrorism initiatives that are so broad in scope that they haveprompted complaints from civil libertarians across the continent. Infact, although it has become fashionable to dismiss Europe's approachtoward terrorism as counterproductive, there is reason to believe thatthe European way of doing things might yield more effective resultsin the long run.
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