What Happened to Europe’s Terrorism Problem?

Terrorism, then and now

A decade ago, covering terrorism linked to Islamist extremism was a big part of my job. In 2015, I wrote about attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. A year later, terrorists killed dozens by driving into Bastille Day celebrations in Nice and a Christmas market in Berlin. In 2017, I covered three attacks in Britain, including a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.

Mass casualty terror attacks felt like something we’d simply have to learn to live with.

But then something changed. Today feels very different. Car-ramming and knife attacks by lone wolf actors who call themselves jihadists still make occasional headlines. But it happens less frequently. And we no longer see the kind of sophisticated quasi-military operations that once killed dozens of people at a time.

There are a number of reasons the era of Bataclan-style terror seems to have faded for now. But we’re still living with its consequences today.

The end of the caliphate

There are reasons behind the decline that almost everyone who studies the phenomenon agrees on.

The first is the downfall of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In 2014, ISIS controlled a territory larger than Portugal. It trained thousands of young European jihadists. But by 2017, the self-proclaimed caliphate had lost almost all its territory, and the compelling narrative that came with it.

Western security services have also gotten better at stopping attacks. France foiled 85 over the last decade and six this year alone, President Emmanuel Macron said last week.

And cityscapes have evolved. Glance around the tourist attractions, or at infrastructure like bridges, and you’re likely to see protective bollards put in place to stop cars.

These changes have created practical problems for would-be terrorists. There’s nowhere to train; plots are discovered more frequently; and attacks are harder to carry out.

It’s around the question of motivation that things get a little more muddled. Is it just that these attacks are harder to pull off, or do fewer people want to commit them? And if so, why?

Radicalization of Islam vs. Islamization of radicalism

There are, roughly speaking, two schools of thought on what drove these attacks. One saw them as the outgrowth of a radical form of Islam; the other thought they were part of a phenomenon that some experts have called “the Islamization of radicalism.”

The first argued that a radical ideology, spread through mosques and by imams but also online, lead to this kind of terrorism; the second argued that these attacks were effectively a youth revolt by second-generation immigrants who happened to seize on Islam as a means of expressing their discontent.

I spoke to the French scholars most associated with each argument: Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy.

Both find support for their ideas in the fading number of big terror attacks. For Roy, it’s proof that a generational cohort has now largely outgrown its radicalism. For Kepel, it’s a sign that the threat has morphed into something less spectacular but still pervasive online, something he calls “ambient jihadism.”

Others say the two theories are, in fact, complementary and can jointly help explain the new reality of a diminished but lingering threat.

Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, told me that since Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza, the number of terror attacks has been rising again. If we don’t feel it much, he said, it’s because these attacks are small in scale, carried out by teenagers and often fail.

The new terrorists are now so nonideological as to be practically indistinguishable from school shooters, he said: “These kids are active in different online subcultures. They have personal motivations, psychological vulnerabilities and often eclectic political ideas. They pick and choose. That creates a phenomenon that sometimes becomes very difficult to categorize. Is that still terrorism?”

These are people whose nihilism is searching for a cause (Roy’s explanation), and who also lack the organization and funding to make their attacks successful (Kepel).

One reason the world should pay more attention, Neumann argues, is that even small-scale attacks can feed another kind of extremism on the far right, which has warned of a clash of civilizations between the West and radical Islam. Part of the far right’s rise, he said, is a legacy of the Bataclan era of terrorism.

Neumann says what we need is a virtual version of what’s been so successful in the real world: bollards for the internet, that can stop people from going down the road to radicalization. Unfortunately, he said, those are the very protections that tech companies seem bent on dismantling.

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