| The European Union as a Collective Actor in the Fight against Post-9/11 Terrorism: Progress and Problems of a Primarily Cooperative Approach (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| Chapter 11 of "Fresh Perspectives on the ‘War on Terror’". Protecting the security of their citizens is one of the core functions and reasons of being of the modern nation state. In a system like the European Union (EU), where the constituent member states retain full national sovereignty over matters of internal security, the role of EU common institutions in this critical domain is far from obvious. When terrorism first afflicted the European Community member states in the 1970s they responded in 1975 by setting up a loose intergovernmental cooperation framework outside of the partly supranational legal and institutional framework of the European Communities (EC) of the time. This so-called TREVI framework remained outside of the EC treaty framework; had no legal base, permanent structures, legislative powers or budget. Nevertheless TREVI was seen at the time as quite successful in that it allowed for information exchange and occasional cross-border coordination of measures. In 1993, as a result of the Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty on European Union or TEU), TREVI was incorporated into the EU as part of the provision on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) cooperation in the context of the new third pillar, Title VI of the TEU. Inclusion of TREVI in the third pillar brought cooperation against terrorism for the first time within the ambit of the EU Treaties and institutions. Yet the absence of any defined objectives and of any external action competence, the inadequate legal instruments provided for by the Maastricht Treaty, and institutional provisions that retained much of the intergovernmental nature of the previous TREVI cooperation made the third pillar an only marginally more effective framework for anti‑terrorism cooperation. | |||||||||||||||
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