The European Union set a goal for member states of collectively investing $314 billion in the green energy transition by 2030, with two-thirds of that to be spent in just the next 5 years, by 2027. This commitment is on top of the plans the 27 member states already had.

The new goal is to get 45% of Europe’s electricity from renewables by 2030, up from a previous goal of 40%.

In addition, the Energy ministers of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark issued a manifesto of energy independence from Russian methane gas on Wednesday, pledging themselves to create massive new wind farms in the North Sea off their coasts that will have a capacity of 65 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 and 130 GW by 2050. The European Union only has about 16 gigawatts of offshore wind installed at the moment, so they are planning to increase that by almost ten times by 2050.

The Biden adminstration’s goal for offshore wind by 2030 is only 30 gigawatts, so these four countries are aiming higher than the entire US.

Denmark and Germany already had big plans for expanding offshore wind but they are now increasing their goals. The four states are also innovating in making plans for multiple connections so that the wind farms will supply a common four-country grid. In fact, they say they want to work toward a pan-Europe grid.

They also want to innovate: “We will monitor the development of technology for solar photovoltaic within offshore wind farms.” Wind turbine/ PV solar hybrid installations produce energy more efficiently and more inexpensively.

Denmark has an artificial wind energy island on the drawing board, but now Belgium will also construct one. Indeed, all four countries will “begin planning for multiple energy hubs and islands.”

The four countries also pledged to speed up permitting, a major bottleneck for wind farms in Europe. The ministers insist, “renewable energy should be considered as being in the overriding public interest and serving public safety.”

Nikolaus J. Kurmayer at Euractiv.com quotes European commission President Ursula von der Leyen as saying, “Nowadays we have permitting times between six and nine years.” She said that these would be reduce to one year in certain “go-to” areas, i.e. high-priority green zones, including the country of Denmark.

If these plans are implemented, they will likely have unforeseen side effects, such as impelling technological innovation by European scientists and companies in the green energy space, and increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of wind and solar.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh had urged the EU to move beyond its usual condemnations and prevent settlement products from reaching markets across the bloc. This is simply unacceptable for Israel. “It is inconsistent with the Israeli government policy focused on improving the lives of Palestinians and strengthening the Palestinian Authority, and with improving Israel’s relations with European countries,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Since the US has indirectly tasked Israel with helping the PA to regain some degree of control, following the damage that it brought on itself by cancelling the Palestinian elections and killing activist Nizar Banat earlier this year, the Israeli government is now attempting to create an image of itself being shackled as it tries to “improve the lives of Palestinians”.

The claim by the ministry is, of course, ludicrous. If settlements violate international law and are deemed a war crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC), any products derived from settlements are tainted. The use of cheap Palestinian labour by Israeli companies in illegal settlements is one way in which the state profits from settlement produce; the Palestinian labourers are simply struggling to survive. It is worth noting that the UN’s Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk agreed with the ICC’s designation of settlements as a war crime.

Belgium’s decision is a tiny step in comparison with what the EU should be advocating for and implementing: sanctions against Israel for its colonial violence. Yet that step was enough for Israel to strike an aggressively defensive posture, even though the EU is far from making such policies mandatory upon its member state, as it should be if the Court of Justice has any credibility.

If Israel is intent on continuing its de facto annexation of Palestinian land, why should Belgium — or anyone else — not draw attention to Israel’s violations of international law? Far from singling out Israel, Belgium’s decision merely points out the politics of colonial violence so that its citizens can make informed decisions as consumers. The repercussions that Israel might face as a consequence of Belgium’s clarification about colonial expansion are related directly to Israel’s actions. If Belgium sets a precedent for other EU countries to follow, which is unlikely at a regional level given the EU’s ties to Israel, the settler-colonial state is not in a position to criticise other countries for trying to adhere to international law.

The EU has regularly expressed “concern” over Israel’s settlement expansion, yet it has continued to work closely with the apartheid state and strengthen its diplomatic ties. Belgium’s decision, however, has proved to other EU member states that they do not require the bloc to mandate action that is in line with international law. So far, non-binding rulings regarding Israel have largely lain dormant, if not dead in the water. The labelling move by Belgium is thus to be welcomed. If it does set a precedent and is followed by other EU countries, there may well be a significant challenge to Israel’s colonial violence as well as ongoing EU complacency.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via ( Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “TRT is a Turkish public broadcast service. Wikipedia
Belgium to start labelling goods made in illegal Israeli settlements”

Thousands of protesters carrying effigies of Donald Trump marched through Brussels on Wednesday (24 May) after the US president arrived for talks with the EU and NATO.

“Trump not welcome,” said banners waved by the crowd, which police said numbered around 9,000. Organisers put the size of the demonstration at 12,000. “He called Brussels a hellhole and yet he comes here like a conqueror,” left-wing protester Yannick Blaise told AFP.

Trump sparked fury by deriding the Belgian capital as a “hellhole” ruined by Muslim immigration in January 2016 — two months before suicide bombers killed 32 people in the city.

The rally filled the central Bourse square of the city just hours after Trump touched down in Air Force One for high-stakes talks with allies.

Trump met Belgium’s King Philippe and Queen Mathilde, then held talks with Prime Minister Charles Michel, telling him that fighting terrorism was a priority.

Security was tight throughout the city but the protest passed off peacefully. Some wore t-shirts saying “Make Humanity Great Again” and “Donald Back to USSR” — referring to a probe into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Many carried blond-haired effigies of the US president, and there were also some of Michel.

Belgium’s counter-terrorism efforts are once again being called into question following the recent tragedies in Brussels. The attacks were carried out against soft targets – the public check-in area of Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station – but a series of unusual and suspicious occurrences were also reported at nuclear facilities in the country.

Occurring a week before a major international summit on nuclear security, these events highlight the very real threat to nuclear facilities. For Belgium, this recent episode is one item on a long list of security concerns.

The US repeatedly has voiced concerns about Belgium’s nuclear security arrangements since 2003. That year, Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national and former professional footballer, planned to bomb the Belgian Kleine-Brogel airbase under the aegis of Al-Qaeda.

The airbase, which holds US nuclear weapons, has seen multiple incursions by anti-nuclear activists who have gained access to the site’s “protected area”, which surrounds hardened weapons storage bunkers.

Yet, Belgium only started using armed guards at its nuclear facilities weeks before the March 2016 attacks.

Beyond incursions, so-called “insider threats” have also cost Belgium dearly. The nation’s nuclear industry comprises two ageing power stations first commissioned in the 1970s (Doel and Tihange), and two research facilities, a research reactor facility in Mol, and a radioisotope production facility in Fleurus.

In 2014, an unidentified worker sabotaged a turbine at the Doel nuclear power station by draining its coolant. The plant had to be partially shut down, at a loss of €40 million per month.

Based on this history, the Belgian authorities should be primed to take nuclear security especially seriously. But there are serious questions about whether they are.

[ISI] is watching you

[IS] is believed to have taken possession of radiological materials, including 40kg of uranium compounds in Iraq. This suggests a possible interest in fabricating a radiological dispersal device – or “dirty bomb” – that would spread dangerous radioactive materials over a wide area.

It had been assumed that IS was concentrating this activity in the Middle East. But that all changed in late 2015. A senior nuclear worker at the Mol research facility was found to have been placed under “hostile surveillance” by individuals linked to the Islamic State-sanctioned attacks in Paris. Reports suggested that the terrorist cell may have planned to blackmail or co-opt the worker to gain access to either the facility or radiological materials.

Alongside the 2014 Doel sabotage incident, this raises the spectre of an “insider threat”. A worker could use their access, authority and knowledge to sabotage a nuclear plant or remove material for malicious purposes.

This concern is furthered by reports of a worker at the Doel plant, who was associated with the radical Salafist organisation Sharia4Belgium, joining Al-Qaeda-inspired militants in Syria in late 2012. Following his death in Syria, the Belgian nuclear regulator reported that “several people have … been refused access to a nuclear facility or removed from nuclear sites because they showed signs of extremism”.

And in the wake of the Brussels attacks, the authorities have temporarily revoked the security clearances of 11 nuclear workers at Tihange nuclear plant.

Tightening security worldwide

Meanwhile, the fourth and final meeting in a series of international nuclear security summits is taking place in Washington. This brings together high-level decision makers, including heads of state, to try to improve the international nuclear security regime (which has been described as “a rather messy and complicated affair”).

While strict processes are in place to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there are far fewer shared rules on securing nuclear facilities and materials. This summit has aimed to address this imbalance. The first summit was held in 2010, after US president Barack Obama described nuclear terrorism as the “most immediate and extreme threat” to global security.

So far, the summits have seen significant successes. They have led to the removal of highly enriched uranium from 14 jurisdictions and upgrades to security at 32 material storage facilities. Equipment to detect nuclear materials has also been installed at 328 international borders.

But no further summits are planned after the 2016 meeting and no mechanism has been identified to replace the summit process. That means the future progress of nuclear security is uncertain. And as can be seen in Belgium, the threat remains as real as ever.

Robert J Downes, MacArthur Fellow in Nuclear Security, King’s College London and Daniel Salisbury, Research Associate, King’s College London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

“Nuclear Plants Among The Belgian Sites Facing Possible Terror Threats” – Newsy

“What we feared has happened,” remarked Charles Michel, the prime minister of Belgium, in the immediate aftermath of the horrible and violent attacks on Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station on March 22.

Yes, indeed. Nothing is less surprising than that the vortex of terrorism and repression that has developed since the November 2015 attacks in Paris should have resulted in these new violent attacks.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider how these circumstances came about. These events reflect several, much longer-term issues.

First of all, there is the ever more emphatic pursuit of a level of security that can never be achieved. European leaders from François Hollande to David Cameron are promising somehow to wipe away the threat of terrorism from Europe. That of course cannot happen. Only those who believe most naively in the capacities of Europe’s current intelligence structures – hovering over the incessant noise of email, mobile phone messages and the twittersphere – will believe that what has come into existence can be willed to disappear.

There is indeed a police problem – one above all of capacity and coordination – but the solution to Europe’s security crisis can never simply be more security. That has to be combined with more imaginative efforts to look at the origins of the problems. And that of course means that Europeans need to look at themselves and the societies they inhabit.

Long incubation

Brussels was not randomly selected for this attack. It is a prosperous, peaceful and predominantly secular city. In many ways it embodies the values that many in 21st-century Europe hold dear. But it is also home to radicalised minorities.

Most bars on most nights of the week within easy reach of the Maelbeek metro station will contain a cross-section of the successful young generations of Europe. They mix in those easily permeable domains between European institutions, lobbying and journalism.

But think also of those who are not present in those bars: the micro-communities of Europe’s margin. Some of those are well established and familiar; but others are emphatically more recent – notably the arrival in the poorer districts of central Brussels of populations from North Africa and the Middle East. These are people with relatively little interest in the society they now inhabit. And indeed Belgium seems to have little to offer to them, beyond the immediate and insubstantial opportunities of transient employment. They are the expendable populations, and they know themselves to be that.

Molenbeek

Which brings us inevitably to Molenbeek. That one commune of the 19 which constitute the city of Brussels should have come to symbolise all its problems is in many respects unfair. What has happened in Molenbeek could easily have happened in the neighbouring communes of Anderlecht or Schaerbeek. But the wider reality is indisputable – inner-city communities often lack clear structures of governance, social solidarity and opportunity.

There is a Belgian and a European explanation for that. The Belgian dimension must focus on the manifold complexities of the Belgian state. It is inefficient and simply lacks the capacity to provide effective governance to many of the most disadvantaged populations who now live on its territory.

Belgium is not, by contemporary European standards, a conventional state. It lacks an instinctive ethos of centralism. Belgians know themselves to be diverse and are rightly proud of the fact that they do many things at a local, rather than national level. That works when the participants sign up to rather basic values of co-existence, but it fails when they contain populations who do not experience the basic amenities and opportunities which draw people into the European social contract.

But it is that social contract which has been stretched to breaking point and beyond, in Belgium and elsewhere, over the past 20 years or more. The replacement of structures of social solidarity with the relentless logic of the market, have hollowed out the ways in which the poorer communities of Brussels and many other cities across Europe have invested in their larger collective existence.

There are of course many reasons for that, most obviously the way in which the scale and diversity of migration has transformed cities into communities where there is no identifiable majority. But the larger picture, in Brussels and elsewhere, is the degree to which social inequality has generated its own dynamics of marginalisation and radicalisation.

In Molenbeek, as in many other disadvantaged communities, the emergence of cultures of militant Islam has been less a stand-alone phenomenon than the product of wider phenomena of poor schooling, limited economic opportunities and consequent petty criminality.

Confronting the real task

Previous manifestations of terrorism in Western Europe have had immediate and tangible origins. The conflicts between communities in Northern Ireland and between Basques and the Spanish state are two of the most well-known causes of the 20th Century.

It is tempting to see the current waves of terrorism as very different – the result of the sudden invasion of militant Islam. But in many respects the origins of the current violence remain just as local. They lie in the willingness of young men of immigrant populations to turn the quasi-criminal expertise learned in their formerly marginal lives to more political and violent ends.

For some, such radicalisation leads to Syria and back. For others, there is no need to travel further than across the cities of Brussels and Paris from the neighbourhoods of the marginalised to the bars, music venues and metro stations of the comfortable classes.

All of which suggests that the problems that we – a pronoun which is more exclusive than we are often inclined to recognise – confront today are not going to go away soon. The current terrorism is so amorphous and so shallow in its political affiliations that it may fade away, as those drawn towards it today are attracted to the more immediate opportunities of tomorrow.

But it is more likely that the breaking up, arrest and imprisonment of particular networks of individuals will simply be replaced by other such groups, who will similarly find in particular languages of Islam the vehicle for their angers and their emotional rejection of wider society. Putting back together Europe’s social contract might take longer than any of us would like to think.

Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

CNN: “Nazi salutes at Brussels attack memorial”

The various nostrums proposed to counter Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) terrorism in Europe and North America by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz (armed patrols by police of putative “Muslim neighborhoods”, a Muslim exclusion act, etc.) are of course complete non-starters. So too are killing the children of terrorists or carpet-bombing cities like Mosul. They are unconstitutional or war crimes and are impracticable, so they are just demagoguery– hatemongering in search for votes by bigots and the ignorant.

When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, injuring more than 680 others, and destroying or damaging 324 buildings, the response of the FBI was not to suggest armed patrols of lower middle class white neighborhoods.

One thing law enforcement considered was that McVeigh used a fertilizer bomb. So the authorities began being more careful to monitor large purchases of fertilizer. You zero in on the technical enablers of the instruments of terrorism, not on the ethnic groups from which the terrorists hail. In the case of Brussels, the perpetrators used TATP, and European authorities just need to focus on making it harder to make or easier to detect (I’ll leave the technical details to the experts). Even easily available materials can be monitored. When meth manufacturers started using over the counter sudafed in the US, authorities started requiring a prescription for it. Plus, there are ways to detect TATP and it would be less costly to implement them at airports than to try to monitor all potential terrorists all the time.

Just organizing and training police or gendarmeries for counter-terrorism is important. Belgium authorities did not know what to do with Turkey’s warning that Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been trying to join ISIL in Syria but was detained and deported. That report should have been a big red warning sign (not to mention that El Bakraoui was in violation of his parole and could just have been picked up and sent back to prison very easily). These essential mistakes are procedural and come from police and police officials not recognizing warning signals or not problematizing terrorism as a category of activity that requires vigilance.

You don’t focus on ethnicity, you focus on particular networks. Most lower-middle class whites in the US are, it goes without saying, not dangerous. Most Moroccan-Belgians in Brussels are upright citizens, and they were among the victims of the bombings, about which there are few headlines. You just have to invest in infiltrating small networks. You can’t watch everyone who goes to a white supremacist meeting or who goes to fight in Syria and comes back, but you can watch the groups they are likely to join. Undercover FBI field officers have done a lot of excellent and dangerous work in the US among white supremacist groups.

In the instance of terrorism coming out of discriminated-against communities, community policing can be effective. The representatives of the state have to learn to treat those communities with dignity. Terrorism doesn’t seem to be impelled by poverty, but by humiliation. That is why Trump/Cruz hatemongering makes things worse, not better.

Civil society organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center can play an important role in keeping up public vigilance and monitoring dangerous small networks.

Alerting members of a community to the dangers of the radicalization of their youth is also important. If little Johnny shows up with neo-Nazi tats, that might be a bad sign. Like community policing, community awareness is something that requires respect and building of relationships.

Finally, keeping terrorism, among other crimes and threats to life in society in perspective remains important. It is distressing and needs to be combated, but most people in the US and Europe are far more likely to be hit by lightning than to be killed by terrorism.

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relate video:

Euronews: “JUST IN: Suspects charged in Brussels”

In this column Joaquín Roy, Joaquin Roy, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Director of the European Union Centre at the University of Miami, says the recent terrorist attacks in Belgium indicate the need to strengthen, not weaken, European unity.

MIAMI, Mar 24 2016 (IPS) – The enemy isn’t Brussels: it’s Europe. The so-called Islamic State clearly signaled this by attacking, even more than the airport, a metro station. Maelbeek is not just another subway stop in the Belgian capital. Although the symbolism could have been more dramatic if the terrorists had chosen the neighouring station named after Robert Schuman…but perhaps the tighter security there dissuaded them.

The fact is that it is the symbolic heart of the European Union. Thousands of officials from the three EU institutions – the Council, the Parliament and the Commission – pass through that stop every day.

The Council, the highest EU body, represents the sacrosanct interests of the member states, which since the outbreak of terrorism and the refugee crisis have monopolised decision-making in the bloc. The Parliament, which defends the values of the citizens, feels that its voice is being ignored. The Commission, which defends the essence of the EU treaties, has submitted to the will of the member states.

In contrast with the gratuitous accusations about the EU’s supposed inefficacy, the fact remains that historically it has been a spectacular success which has guaranteed for decades what did not exist in Europe for centuries: stability, peace, progress, justice.

That has been demonstrated by the actions of thousands of immigrants and refugees who have chosen, against all obstacles, to seek refuge in Europe and the EU. They are thousands of people willing to face any risk and pay any price (monetary or personal) to place themselves under the protection of one of the few systems on the planet that can give them what they long for.

This detail has been noticed by the terrorists who have finally identified the ultimate enemy of their actions. It isn’t the states, national societies, governments, or individual capital cities that have already been the victims of their hate, but an entity that tenaciously demands recognition.

The EU still has the potential to become an effective shield, not only to guarantee Europe’s survival as a civilisation, but to be an effective agent of the practical efficacy to fulfill the needs of its citizens. At the same time, it shows that people overseas who desperately want to be under Europe’s protection are right.

Up to now, the terrorists’ targets have been mainly national, in order to trigger, so far without success, a nationalistic and self-protecting reaction by governments fearful of losing their purported national sovereignty.

The attack on the emblematic subway station, the belly-button of the EU institutions, sent a crystal-clear message: the enemy is not the state. It is the collective entity that still manages to safeguard the achievements which, since nearly the end of World War II, still capture the admiration of the rest of the world.

The governments, through faint-hearted decisions in the Council of Europe itself, have on various occasions responded fearfully to terrorist attacks by curbing collective decisions. For example, in a misguided response to last November’s attacks in Paris, the French government eschewed the EU solidarity clause contained in article 222 of the EU treaty, and chose instead to invoke article 42.7 (similar to NATO’s article 5), triggering mutual defence among the member states.

Like other European countries, France decided to reduce European sovereignty, dangerously putting aside the Schengen agreement for border-free travel.

Instead of reinforcing the powers of the institutions, there was a move to strengthen national sovereignty. To obtain the cooperation of the alternative guardians of Europe’s collective authority, Turkey’s complicity in creating a barrier to the invasion of refugees was “bought” under the promise of facilitating its admission to the EU. The idea was that Brussels did not have the necessary power, which bolstered the arguments of the nationalists and of the terrorists themselves.

The attack on the Brussels metro station reminds us that terror itself recognises that the enemy is precisely the entity that the Europeans themselves want to weaken. Perhaps the time has come to return to the origins and assume, once and for all, that it was the national state that was guilty of the holocaust represented by the two European wars which nearly destroyed civilisation on the old continent. What is needed is not what numerous governments and citizen groups are demanding: less Europe. What is urgently necessary is to salvage Maelbeek station.

Instead of dismantling Schengen, what is needed is a treaty that is solid, inside and out, and that guarantees the free traffic of citizens and visitors. To bolster this argument, a supranational force should be created to oversee the borders in a collective manner, not subject to the whims of the states. What is needed is more Europe, not less.

Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Licensed from Inter Press Service

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Democracy Now!: “Frank Barat in Belgium: More War is Not the Answer to Brussels Bombings”

The attacks of March 22 in Brussels were shocking, but not surprising. They reinforced what many have known for years: Belgium has a serious problem with terrorism.

For a long time, security analysts have expressed anxiety about the depth and extent of radicalisation and fundamentalism in the country. It is thought that Belgium has the highest per capita rate of foreign terrorist fighters of any EU country. A February 2016 “high-end estimate” puts that number at 562 out of a population of just over 11 million.

Last November it was revealed that some of the Paris attackers had Belgian connections and were known to the security forces there, and Brussels was virtually locked down for almost a week.

Over recent years there have been attacks on Belgian museums, supermarkets and trains, raising questions about why the country cannot seem to effectively tackle the challenges of insecurity.

As ever, the answer is not a simple one. Rather, as observed by Tim King, Belgium’s “failures are perhaps one part politics and government; one part police and justice; one part fiscal and economic. In combination they created the vacuum that is being exploited by jihadi terrorists”.

A country divided

So-called Islamist extremism in Belgium can be traced back at least to the 1990s, when Algeria-related militant activity in France spilled over into the country. The failure to properly tackle extremism in the 1990s and early 2000s, and to effectively integrate the minority Muslim community, are important factors in understanding how Belgium became fertile ground for radicalisation.

It seems increasingly likely that poorly resourced and fragmented policing at least partly explains the crystallisation of this trend into fatal attacks in and beyond the country. And that is linked to the country’s relative political instability.

Belgium has a sharply fragmented system of policing and justice. In Brussels alone there are six police forces covering 19 communes; an extraordinary system for a city of just under 1.5 million people. While the federal police system includes a counter-terrorism unit of around 500 officers, this seems simply insufficient when compared to the estimated scale of the problem.

Intelligence sharing with non-Belgian forces is also challenging, and remains so in spite of an agreement for enhanced cooperation with the French announced in early 2016. That agreement followed a period of tension related to the role of Belgian and French security failures in respect of the Paris attacks.

Questions for the European Union

However, while the particularities of Belgian politics and policing are relevant to explaining the challenge there, the country is not entirely idiosyncratic. Its challenges are a sharpened manifestation of similar difficulties experienced across the EU.

Europe has an increasing amount of shared counter-terrorism law and institutions such as the European Counter Terrorism Centre within Europol, that are designed to help coordinate counter-terrorism. Yet it still struggles to share and process information across police and security forces. That is true within states, between member states, and between member states and EU institutions. Many individual European countries have long struggled to integrate marginalised populations and to counter radicalisation, and their internal failures are becoming transnational problems.

It is also becoming clear that the ease with which people can travel across Europe, and the desire to maintain freedom of movement as a feature of European citizenship, must be addressed. There are real questions about security, but just as many about what imposing more onerous barriers to travel means for the values and freedoms that underpin the European Union as a political entity.

This points to the fundamental challenge that must, ultimately, be addressed by European leaders. Serious threats to European security are no longer merely external, nor are they confined to states. They are internal, they are serious, and they are difficult to detect. Tackling them effectively while retaining the core of the European political identity may require a fundamental reassessment of what Europe is, what it wants to be, and how that can be achieved.

Passing new counter-terrorism laws is a limited response in the face of this challenge. Domestic police and security forces urgently need effective resources to make it possible for them to enforce the powers they already hold. There needs to be significantly better intelligence sharing with and through institutions such as Europol. There needs to be deeper trust between EU member states. There needs to be a serious consideration of the extent to which movement within Europe can be both free and less risk-laden.

Figuring out ways of creating effective expectations that member states will ensure their domestic security challenges do not create Europe-wide vulnerabilities, while maintaining our identity as a law-based, rights-oriented Europe of freedoms must be the goal, but it is a difficult one to achieve.

The question now is whether Europe can resist compromising its commitment to freedom as it strives to improve its ability to deal with terrorism.

Fiona de Londras, Professor of Global Legal Studies, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

France 24: “Brussels Terror attacks: two suicide bombers identified as El-Bakraoui brothers”

Just as during the German invasions of 1914 and 1940, war, it seems, is coming to France through Belgium. If one follows the logic of the statements of various French political leaders since the bloody attacks in Paris on November 13, Belgium has become the base from which [the so-called] Islamic State has brought the conflicts of the Middle East to the streets of Paris.

There is much about that logic that would not withstand serious analysis. France has grown many of its problems within its own suburbs. And groups committed to armed action, from the Resistance movements of World War II to the Basque nationalist groups of the 1980s and 1990s, have often found it expedient to use neighbouring territories as a base from which to launch their operations.

That said, the French authorities have a case. Molenbeek – an urban commune on the north-western edges of Brussels – is unlikely to feature any time soon on tourist-bus tours of historic Brussels.

Though it lies only a couple of kilometres from the Grand Place and the Manneken Pis, and a mere taxi ride from European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s office, Molenbeek is another world. This inner-city area, now on the front pages of newspapers across Europe, is deprived of funds, social cohesion and effective government.

Former residents have left for more prosperous suburbs on the outskirts of Brussels. In their place, a fractured community has emerged. Those who carried out the gun attacks in Paris allegedly found convenient anonymity there as well as access to weaponry and the support of like-minded radicalised [Muslim] militants.

It was not always so. Molenbeek was, only 20 years ago, a Socialist bastion of working-class Brussels. It is francophone for the most part, but composed predominantly of people who, a couple of generations earlier, had arrived as Dutch-speaking migrants from Flanders.

Times, however, have changed. Its former football team, FC Brussels, has slipped into the third division – and, in the last communal elections, the Socialists, who controlled the commune for decades under the leadership of leading Brussels political figure Philippe Moureaux, finally lost control amid a multitude of accusations of institutionalised corruption.

The present mayor, Françoise Schepmans, is an implausibly middle-class Liberal, who presides over a commune which is indisputably broke, but also broken.

The combined impact of urban decline, social exodus and the remorseless development of Brussels as a city that exists to service a rootless international elite has found its mirror in the transformation of Molenbeek into a commune composed in large part of short-term migrant workers, drawn from a vast array of cultural backgrounds, united only by their limited engagement with somewhere called Belgium.

All of this is a step beyond what Europeans have become accustomed to think of as multiculturalism. Brussels has long been a multicultural city, and especially so since the arrival of substantial communities of North African, Turkish and Central African migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. But Molenbeek, in common with some of the other inner-city districts of Brussels, has become a micro-world of multiple communities within which people construct their own sense of identity.

A world away from Brussels

Much of this is the product of the contemporary tides of globalisation. What is true of Molenbeek would be equally true of areas of London and Paris. But what is specifically Belgian about this story is the state of Belgium.

Belgium has many virtues as a political community. It has provided a model of how the decline of national loyalties need not be accompanied by mass mobilisation and political violence. But the radical devolution of central power that has occurred since the 1980s has emptied the Belgian federal institutions of much of their former power. Their responsibilities have gradually been devolved to a complex structure of regions and linguistic communities.

That is a contemporary story of the decline of centralising nationalism. But, as current events have served to reveal, that has also resulted in the erosion of public institutions.

Molenbeek lacks not only resources but also the support provided by an effective state authority. As one of 19 largely independent communes of the city of Brussels, its public officials, who are confronted by all of the problems of an inner-city suburb, lack the ability to provide effective schooling, social services or the public structures which might generate the ties of community. The consequence is a world where the more conventional role of the state has been supplanted by other less formal sources of provision, support and community.

It also, as we have discovered, lacks much by way of an effective police. That is not unique to Molenbeek. Ever since the horrific child kidnappings committed by Marc Dutroux and his accomplices in the 1990s, the manifold shortcomings of the Belgian police have hardly been a secret. Too much localism, too many overlapping authorities and too much politicisation of nominations have all diminished the capacity of Belgium’s multiple police forces to rise to more than the most mundane challenges.

This, as the events of the past few days have demonstrated, has left Molenbeek vulnerable to gangsterism and opportunistic terrorism. To fix such problems, Belgium, it seems, might have to reinvent itself as a state.

Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Euronews from a couple of days ago: “Brussels anti-terror raid triggers tension in Molenbeek”