ELISE Final Synthesis Report

1. Introduction

1.0. ELISE - European Liberty and Security: Security Issues, Social Cohesion and Institutional Development of the European Union- is a research project funded by the Fifth Framework Research Programme of the DG for Research of the European Commission for three years (beginning 1 October 2002). This report presents the main research findings, outlines some of the policy implications of these findings and offers policy recommendations [1].

1.1. Our starting point is the contention that the liberal and democratic traditions of modern European politics hinge on aspirations for both liberty and security, although the relationship between these two values has had a long and often very troubled history. We have thus sought to understand recent concerns about security among EU citizens while bearing in mind the concern not to undermine civil liberties, human rights and social cohesion. We have done so initially by seeking to place contemporary dilemmas in a broader context, which enables a wide range of scholarly traditions to engage in productive research over areas of common concern.

1.2. The problems we address are the multiple challenges to the principles, institutions and practices through which claims to reconcile liberty and security are made. Some of these challenges have been driven by the emergence of the EU as a novel form of political organisation. Some have resulted from broader forms of economic, cultural and technological developments that have come to be identified as globalisation. Some have come from the intensification of worries about new forms of violence associated with the attacks of 11 September 2001 and with various responses to these attacks. And some are linked to perceptions of the nature of sovereign states and of the relations between these states.

1.3. In part, this task has involved looking back several centuries in order to understand how the relation between liberty and security has been articulated both in the modern state and in the modern international system. In part it has also involved looking at the multi- faceted changes affecting contemporary EU security policy, including the enlargement process, agreements about common EU external frontiers, and new strategies developed to combat terrorism at the national, EU and international levels. Finally, it has involved a critical assessment of what is at stake in the seemingly common sense idea that it is necessary to strike an appropriate ‘balance’ between the claims of security and the claims of liberty.

1.4. The metaphor of a balance captures many popular assumptions about the place of legitimate violence in modern political life. It also promotes a profoundly misleading account of the social forces, institutional practices and legal principles at work in contemporary democratic societies, most especially when questions about liberty and security are involved. The ELISE project has sought to untangle the many different and often conflicting dynamics that are obscured by this metaphor so as to offer a richer account of what is at stake when we are asked to make some kind of trade-off between established freedoms and pr inciples for security in a moment of emergency. If difficult decisions are to be made, they need to be understood not in relation to fuzzy and depoliticising metaphors of balance but to hard questions about what it means to make an exception to the normal expectations of liberty, equality, democracy and the rule of law in modern political life.

1.5. Against the easy assumption of a need to strike a balance, the ELISE project has worked with more technically precise accounts of a politics of the exception [2]. These accounts speak to the intellectual roots of security analyses grounded in traditions of political realism, to legal traditions concerned with the limits of the rule of law, and to historical accounts of liberal and democratic societies confronted with pressures to become more illiberal and more authoritarian. The ELISE project has thus been concerned to examine precisely how a new politics of the exception is being constructed as a response to claims about new forms of insecurity and to evaluate their broader implications. Against this background, particular attention has been paid to potential conflicts between civil liberties/human rights, specific security measures and the effects of such measures on the overall socio-economic fabric of the EU. 3 Attention has also been paid to the potential conflict between technically efficient security measures and threats of disaffection on the part of targeted population groups.

1.6. In general terms it would be fair to say that participants in the ELISE project are persuaded that many recent policy responses constitute cures that are quite as worrying in the long term as the disease to which they respond. This is partly because they trigger memories of the way claims about immediate dangers have led to the erosion of liberalism and democracy at other moments of European history. It is also partly because it is fairly clear that there is an increasing discrepancy between the organisational capacities devoted to security on a global scale and the increasingly fragmented resources available for sustaining liberties under democratic conditions.

See also ELISE Conclusions & Policy Recommendations

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ELISE Final Synthesis Report