EUROSCOPE. The theology of terror

Europe has been no stranger to terrorist attacks — 152 attacks motivated by separatism, politics and religion were carried out across the EU in 2013 alone, according to data published last year by intelligence agency Europol.

Nevertheless the Paris attacks in early January, which left at least 17 people dead, threw the region’s vulnerabilities into stark relief. While the threat of large scale planned attacks such as the 2001 attacks on New York or the 2005 tube and bus bomb attacks on London are something European countries have long inured themselves to, the Paris attacks highlighted a newer and equally devastating phenomenon — the rise of smaller radicalised groups intent on carrying out terrorist activities without vast networks and resources behind them.

Till now most terror attacks have not been linked to Islam in Europe — of the attacks recorded by Europol in 2013, only a handful were driven by what the intelligence agency calls “religious radicalisation” — including the murder of an off-duty British army soldier in May that year by two British Muslim converts and a non-fatal attack on a French soldier in Paris.

However, a number of other statistics do point to the fact that threats are on the rise. For example, the number of individuals arrested for religiously inspired terrorism across the region has doubled to over 200 a year over the five-year period to 2013. Since the Paris attack other chilling statistics have come to light: a recent CNN report quoted unnamed intelligence as estimating the number of sleeper cells across France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands at around 20. The shootout in Verviers, Belgium, in which two suspected terrorists were killed by armed police, just days after the Paris attacks, provided another reminder of how close other countries had come to terrorist incidents. Subsequent arrests of individuals in Greece pointed to how far some networks reached across the continent.

Leaders of several European governments have revealed that a number of terror attacks have been foiled in recent months, while intelligence chiefs have been unusually candid in admitting that it was inevitable that some cells would slip through the counter-terrorism net.

In a speech the day after the Paris attacks, Andrew Parker, the head of Britain’s domestic security service, MI5 highlighted the dangers posed by “volatile” individuals motivated by terrorist propaganda who weren’t part of sophisticated networks who often acted with little planning and were harder to detect.

Last week Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol estimated that up to 5,000 European nationals had travelled to countries such as Syria and Iraq, many returning radicalised and intent on carrying out terrorist attacks in their home countries.

Intelligence agencies have pointed to a number of reasons for the raised threat — not least the impact of the returnees from Syria and Iraq. Social media too has been highlighted as a recruitment and propaganda tool (at the weekend The Observer , quoting data from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation estimated that around 30 women based in Syria were attempting to use social media to recruit extremists to carry out terror attacks back in the UK).

Europe’s response has been several-fold — alert levels have been raised to just below the gravest in several countries as well as across the region as a whole, while a number of countries have deployed troops and additional police forces at transport hubs, borders and centres of Jewish community life (schools and synagogues).

However, it is the longer-term factors in Europe’s response that may prove most significant to counterterrorism efforts. European leaders have so far attempted to elicit a united reaction to the attacks from their countries — in his immediate reaction just after the Paris attacks French President Francois Hollande appealed for unity, eager not to alienate the country’s sizeable Muslim community (France’s Muslim community is the largest in Europe, linking back to the former colony of Algeria) while German Chancellor Angela Merkel joined a Muslim rally for tolerance in Berlin last week.

Still, across the region, increasing Islamophobic sentiment threatens to heighten inter-community tensions — a rally by the anti-Islam movement Pegida in Dresden, Germany a fortnight ago drew around 25,000 people, with several related (though not as large) marches taking places in other parts of Europe.

In Denmark the anti-Islam, anti immigration Danish People’s Party is pushing for the closure of a mosque in the country while in Britain, the right of centre UK Independence Party, whose focus to now has centred on immigration particularly from the EU, has launched a vehement attack on Islam, warning about a “fifth column” living in Europe following the Paris attacks.

Even the British government has risked jeopardising its till-now good relations with the wider Muslim community after a controversial letter sent to mosques across the UK urged them to demonstrate how Islam could be “part of British identity.”

In the face of rising intolerance it will be crucial for Europe’s political leaders to steer clear of populist rhetoric and avoid alienating sections of society.

Also crucial will be the approach to civil liberties and surveillance — while intelligence agencies have, understandably, raised the need to step up surveillance some responses have worried the tech community – such as recent comments made by British Prime Minister David Cameron about the need to clamp down on encryption — a move, which many within the industry have argued could harm Britain’s strong tech industry.

There is also the question of whether the terror attacks could throw the European economic recovery off course: Germany is growing at a snail’s pace, while political upheaval — such as that which could follow this week’s general elections in Greece — could have reverberations across the region. In that context how much of a threat does the terrorist pose to economic recovery?

While in the past a number of studies have pointed to some impact of a raised terrorist threat on economic growth and investment (one for example, published in the European Economic Review by a Harvard economist, Alberto Abadie, pointed to a 5-per cent fall in the net FDI position of a country following a one standard deviation increase in the intensity of terror attacks), Europe is far off those levels at the moment, and economists seem to have little expectation that the terrorist threat will hit the region’s economy.