Abstract

International terrorism has become one of the principal security scourges of the twenty-first century. Terrorism itself is not a new phenomenon for many members of the European Union, who have either experienced it as a domestic problem or suffered it during periods of transition from colonial power status. As a domestic problem for some European Community states from the 1960s onwards, it created an unhappy precedent chiefly because Western European states achieved very little cooperation in countering the problem (Den Boer, 2009: 211). This was because the groups acted primarily within their own borders and there was consequently an absence of shared threat perceptions amongst the major European countries.