EU Anti-terrorism After "9.11": Policy, Implementation And Evaluation

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks,international terrorism becomes prominent and began to spread across the world,Europe has gradually become an important base and major target of international terrorism.European security is facing serious challenges from international terrorism,counter-terrorism has become an important issue and a new policy area of the EU.Under the guidance of the EU counterterrorism Strategy,the EU has introduced more than a hundred of policies and measures in prevent,protecting,pursuing,responding and international cooperation areas.In order to better promote the implementation of these policies and measures in member states,the EU has also actively strengthened its institutional structure and developed some supporting tools to coordinate their practical actions.From the practical perspective,the EU Counterterrorism policy after 9/11 is effective.According to the data from International terrorism database,Europol annual reports and Eurobarometer,the number of terrorist attacks(failed,foiled and successful attacks)that took place within the EU during 2006 to 2016 has generally dropped,the number of arrested,and the conviction rate of the suspects related to terrorism crime increase clearly,meanwhile,the ultimate goal of EU counterterrorism is to ensure the EU citizens to live in a more security area,by comparing the statistics of the public attitude towards the safety of their living environment,it shows that most of the EU residents feel that their living environment is safe,which means that the EU‘s counterterrorism efforts really have effect.However,as counterterrorism is a complicated and extremely difficult task,the EU counterterrorism has a long way to go.The EU still faces many dilemmas and challenges both on the policy level and institutional level,such as unbalanced policy development,blind copying of foreign policy,overlapping mandates and lacking powers of the EU agencies,etc.In addition,the dispute between human rights and security is also an important problem that plagued the EU‘s counterterrorism work.The factors that cause these difficulties and challenges are the limitation of the nature of the EU,the shackles of sovereign thinking of the EU member states and also the very nature of the phenomenon of terrorism.Since these factors are difficulty to eliminate in the near future,the EU‘s counterterrorism work will continue to be full of thorns.