European Union and Transnational Terrorism. A Normative Analysis of Strategic Spillovers

Abstract

There are two main categories of antiterrorism policies - active and defensive. Active measures target the terrorists directly, and by weakening their ability to operate, are a sort of public good. On the other hand, defensive measures try to protect a potential target. Unilateral defensive measures can induce terrorists to substitute one target for another, in particular a foreign one. These positive and negative externalities of different antiterrorism measures raise the question of the best institutional setting for countries cooperation. This paper studies how in democratic countries public opinion and past intelligence proactive policies affect the efficiency of counterterrorism defensive policies according to different institutional scenarios regulating cooperation among countries. The aim of the paper is to study the consequences of four different scenarios on the choice of defensive policies: full decentralization, intelligence cooperation, unanimous political cooperation, such as the European Union for security policies, and full political union, the first best solution. The main result is that intelligence cooperation reduces the possibility of inefficient defensive policies more than unanimous political cooperation, a case of second best theory.