Changing Conceptions of Security and their Implications for EU Justice and Home Affairs Cooperation. CEPS Policy Brief No. 26, October 2002

[From the Introduction]. From the initiation of the debate about Europol in the late 1980s, some law enforcement agencies and political thinkers developed a concept of security that links together broad categories of activities: terrorism, drug trafficking, organised crime, transborder crime, illegal immigration, asylum seekers, and minority ethnic groups. This conception represents a variety of very different problems as elements of one general security threat. In addition, there has been a blurring of the distinction between internal and external security, as the threat of a conventional military attack on Western Europe has declined. This idea has been sharply criticised, by those such as Didier Bigo, (who has labelled this concept a security continuum,)1 for linking very different activities, profiling of groups and criminalising illegal immigrants. It is also objectionable on grounds that it categorises difficult problems as security threats too quickly and too emphatically. A crucial element in the merging of internal and external security has been the re-classification of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers as problems of security. But the linkage between security fields lies at the core of the redefinition of the West European security following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Integration of the tasks and functions of police services, immigration services, customs and intelligence services, is sustained by the gradual re-shaping of the security continuum under the pressure of events, such as, most dramatically, the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Threat analysis has led to growing importance being attributed to the collection of strategic intelligence, the increased role of certain national police agencies, the entry of intelligence services into domains previously regarded as the preserve of the ‘police’, and problems of definition of roles and coordination of police agencies. However, it also provides the opportunity of an enhanced role for Europol in both strategic intelligence-gathering and the coordination of investigations of transborder criminal activities. But certain questions are likely to be raised in an acute and urgent form on the problem of the relatively slow progress of EU judicial cooperation and integration, the protection of individual rights, the Treaty basis of JHA cooperation, the legitimacy of rapid development of EU responsibilities in this field, to mention only the most obvious ones