Introduction: Strategies for Regional Cooperation in the Mediterranean: Rethinking the Parameters of the Debate

Abstract

This account maps out the key discourses and policies that shape the response of regional political actors to the ‘new terrorism’ associated with radical Islamist groups after 9/11. It details the dominant representations of international security before and after 9/11 in relation to an elusive notion of security community in the Mediterranean. In particular it stresses the dilemmas of securitization at the regional level in a context where the state system remains the dominant frame of reference for conceiving and organizing cooperation. Finally it highlights how the discourse on the ‘new terrorism’ creates a superficial agreement between states north and south of the Mediterranean but largely fails to recognize the different security dilemmas experienced by each state and does not meaningfully capture the dynamics of national and global jihadism.

Acknowledgements

Frédéric Volpi is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (award RES-223–25-0056) and of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop award (HSD. 981401) for this project. He would also like to thank Richard Gillespie, John Horgan and Sami Zemni for their useful comments on this article.

Notes

¹ See for example the results of the poll on British attitudes on how to deal with terrorism and on the importance of civil liberties published in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings in The Guardian, 22 August 2005. Available at http://politics.guardian.co.uk/polls/story/0.1553829,00.html (accessed 21 January 2006).

² Within the EU itself there were at that time serious disagreements between France and the UK regarding the treatment of suspected Islamist radicals from Algeria and the process of extradition of terrorist suspects – see, for example, The Times, 28 June 2002, p. 14; The Times, 2 October 2002, p. 15.

³ This political approach is presented by some as a distinct neo-conservative perspective on world affairs – see Halper and Clarke (2004).

⁴ For detailed examinations of these dimensions of contemporary political Islam and their implications for international politics and security see, for example, Fuller (2003); Roy (2004).

⁵ Suicide bombing is a rather new form of terrorism in Europe and, indeed, in the world at large since this form of violence only took shape in the Middle East and in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. Though suicide attacks are part of a much longer military tradition, their association with the ‘philosophy of the bomb’ that revolutionists and anarchists developed in the late nineteenth century is more recent by (technical) necessity.

⁶ Here I am making an analytical distinction between two approaches to political violence that represent ‘ideal types’ of national or global activism. In practice, one is often confronted by mixed forms of transnational direct action that obey partially these two rationales at the same time.

⁷ Full audio interview available at http://www.rtl.fr/rtlinfo/article.asp?dicid = 189520 (accessed 20 February 2006). These (and other) positions of Boubakeur were hotly debated both within the Council and the Muslim community at large – see, for example, Bowen (2004).

⁸ See UK Civil Contingencies Secretariat fact-sheets. Available at: http://www.ukresilience.info (accessed 8 June 2005). Subsequently, the government tried to widen its options by reworking extraditions agreements with the detainees' country of origin, emphasizing again the state-centric character of the counter-terrorist response.