Collective securitization and crisification of EU policy change: two decades of EU counterterrorism policy

ABSTRACT One of the founding fathers of the European Union (EU) was very correct in suggesting that people would only recognize the necessity of change once a crisis was upon them, as the “war on terror” would show. The EU, as this special issue shows, joined in this “war on terror”, whereby it collectively securitized the threat to become a European, rather than a national security threat – a European “war on terror”. It aims to assess the collective securitization process in EU counterterrorism, evaluating this as a process between a construction of security threats and the development of supranational governance through crisification. It posits that EU counterterrorism needs to be analysed as a process driven by collective securitization as part of an ongoing process of crisification that leads to increased supranational governance.