Europe’s Shattered Peace, Europe’s Struggling Values - by Judy Dempsey

The terrorist attacks that have killed at least 31 people in Brussels and injured some 270 others on March 22 have changed Europe’s perception about itself. Until now, despite so many calculated murders of many innocent civilians in Madrid, London, Copenhagen, and Paris— among other cities across Europe—since 2004,

 European leaders have adopted ad hoc measures to counter this new challenge. What makes Brussels different is that there’s now an acceptance by EU leaders that these attacks will continue.

All the measures taken so far have fallen way short of confronting the threat. European leaders didn’t want to admit that the peace that reigned across Europe since the end of World War II had been shattered. As Elmar Brok, the German chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee said after the Brussels bombings, “This is a new form of war that Europe has to deal with.”

This is the new and uncomfortable reality that European leaders now have to accept and respond to. It is a reality that is not going to go away as long as the so-called Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and their battalions of supporters inside and outside Europe continue their mission to attack everything that Europe stands for. It is Europe’s liberal values and open society that the perpetrators of these attacks, many of them born in Europe, are taking advantage of. Those values are now at stake.

Proclaiming that Europe stands by its values in the wake of the terrorist attacks is all very well. But the rhetoric will not make Europe’s citizens feel any safer nor will it deter more bombers. European leaders face the uncomfortable but necessary task of dealing with a war that wants to destroy what Europe stands for.

Europe’s Shattered Peace, Europe’s Struggling Values - Carnegie Europe - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

EU Security A Complete Mess : No Organization - No "Chiefs" - No "Indians" - and extremely poor coordination

EU Security  Coordination In Poor Shape

Belgian authorities actually had accurate advance warnings that terrorists planned to launch attacks at the Brussels airport and subway — yet failed to act, according to several reports.

Despite the knowledge, the intelligence and security apparatus in Brussels — home to most of the European Union agencies — was limited and ill-prepared to handle the alert,

In other developments Wednesday, March 23, Turkey’s prime minister said his country last year arrested one of the Brussels attackers and deported him to the Netherlands, but Belgium ignored warnings that he was a militant.

“One of the Brussels attackers was detained in Gaziantep (in southern Turkey (close to the Syrian border) and then deported” to the Netherlands, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters about Ibrahim El Bakraoui.

Turkey said it warned both Belgium and the Netherlands that Ibrahim was a “foreign terrorist fighter.”

Dutch authorities later allowed him to go free because Belgian authorities could not establish any ties to terrorism, an official in the Turkish president’s office said.

Turkey formally notified Belgium of the 29-year-old Belgian national’s deportation on July 14, 2015.

The announcement came after authorities said they discovered a cache of explosives in a house and a farewell note from an airport suicide bomber — one of two brothers identified in the attacks.

The brothers were identified as Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, both of whom had extensive criminal records but had not been on watch lists as potential terror threats.

What Europe does not have is any cross-national agency with the power to carry out its own investigation and make its own arrests.

This means that cross-border policing in the European Union has big holes. It depends heavily on informal cooperation rather than formal institutions with independent authority.

Sometimes this works reasonably well. Sometimes this works particularly badly. Belgium is a notorious problem case, because its policing arrangements are heavily localized.

In the past, many Belgian policing forces have had difficulty cooperating with each other, let alone with other European forces.

Europe has to put some serious thought into setting up a "Pan European Security Network" to coordinate, trace, find, capture and if need be, eliminate security threats to its citizens. This has to happen pretty quickly.

EU-Digest