EU counter-terrorist financing cooperation: differentiating supranational policy entrepreneurship by the Commission and the Council Secretariat

The European Union counter-terrorist financing (EU-CTF) regime has experienced significant developments since 2001. This article builds on the notion of supranational policy entrepreneurship (SPE) in order to investigate the post-9/11 development of EU-CTF regime. Admittedly, counter-terrorism is a policy area in which supranational institutions have rarely taken the lead, nor consistently been very active. However, the article suggests that, despite the centrality that member states maintain in the policy-making process, European institutions, notably the European Commission and the Council Secretariat, have been significant in EU-CTF cooperation. While the European Commission and the Council Secretariat both played the role of an SPE, the article outlines the different ways in which this occurred. Empirically, the article challenges an intergovernmentalist perspective by examining the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and Financial Action Task Force recommendations on countering terrorist financing at the EU level