Terrorism has evolved. It no longer requires a foreign passport or an overseas command centre — it breeds inside European cities, feeding on the continent’s own political dysfunction. And while European governments have invested heavily in security infrastructure, the sobering truth is that the greatest obstacle to effective counterterrorism is not the enemy without, but the divisions within. The European Union’s structural fragmentation has quietly become one of the most exploitable weaknesses in the Western security order.

The contradiction at the heart of EU security cooperation is straightforward: the Union asks sovereign states to share the burden of a collective threat without surrendering the sovereignty that makes collective action difficult. Security policy remains a national prerogative, which means counterterrorism coordination depends not on binding institutional authority, but on voluntary political will. That will is unreliable. It bends under electoral pressure, shifts with governments, and shrinks when domestic agendas conflict with collective necessity. Every time a member state places its polling calculations above its security obligations, it opens a gap — and gaps are what terrorists are trained to find.

The legal incoherence across the Union compounds........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)