Introduction

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks the European Union (EU) has increasingly emerged as an actor in its own right in the fight against international terrorism, providing a framework for collective action both inside the EU and on the international level. Based on the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999, the scope of EU anti-terrorism law and policy has expanded significantly since 2001, and the Madrid terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004 have given a new impetus to this process.

This chapter analyses the role of the EU in the fight against international terrorism by first looking at the legal, structural and political bases of the EU, and then by analyzing the Union's response to 9/11 and the 11 March 2004 attacks. It will provide an overall evaluation of the Union's potential and limits as a political and legal actor in this field, taking into account reform proposals of the European Convention's Draft Constitution for the EU.

The bases for EU action

Legal bases

At the time of 9/11 EU Member States could already look back to a quarter of a century of cooperation against terrorism. The TREVI cooperation, which had come into operation in 1976 and can be regarded as the ancestor of the ‘third pillar’ of the 1990s, had originally focused entirely on the cross-border fight against the terrorist groups which were trying to destabilize several of the EC Member States at that time, especially Germany, Italy and the UK. Yet TREVI had remained a loose inter-governmental structure without legal bases, competences, permanent institutions and financial means, largely limited to information exchange.