WASHINGTON – “We have the Europe we deserve,” admitted French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Wednesday. The question is how Europeans can build the security structures they need.
The first requirement is solidarity, within each country and among the 28 nations of the European Union. This begins with better links with the Muslim communities, the angry, alienated people at Europe’s table. Yes, Europe needs to be more welcoming, but that’s only half of it. Muslims need to embrace the obligations of European residence and citizenship.
What would this solidarity look like? After Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims in America by the thousands volunteered for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. They wanted to show themselves and their fellow citizens that they were loyal Americans.
European Muslims should step up now in a similar way. In immigrant neighborhoods like Molenbeek in Brussels or the banlieues that surround Paris, Muslim leaders who want change should organize campaigns to enlist their neighbors in the army, police and security services. European Muslims need to feel ownership of security, rather than viewing the police as an occupying army.
The jihadists often emerge from a youth-gang subculture of violence and intimidation. No wonder the Belgian authorities stumbled for four months looking for Islamic State fugitive Salah Abdeslam. No wonder they couldn’t find the suicide bombers who struck Tuesday, four days after Abdeslam’s arrest, even though they suspected an attack was coming. Nobody would talk to them.
The second requirement is fairness. The European Union has largely been a project of the elites. The powerful companies (and nations) have prospered. The weak have suffered. Should it surprise us that this arrogant system is cracking at the seams?
The third requirement is for Europe to grow up about intelligence. Many Europeans seem to think that good intelligence is created by immaculate conception, rather than through the hard and sometimes intrusive work of surveillance. The authorities often don’t mind if America does the counterterrorist snooping, so long as they don’t have to admit it to their publics.
Europeans don’t like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don’t spy. This immature approach leaves them unable to demand accountability from the security services after chronic intelligence failures like the ones we have seen in France and Belgium.
A fourth requirement is for a trans-Atlantic partnership that’s equal to the seriousness of this crisis. The leaders of America and Europe should meet in a crisis summit – Brussels would be a good spot – and they should stay until they have agreed on plans for collecting and sharing intelligence together, so that citizens across Europe are safer.
Bureaucracy, a modern European specialty, is the enemy: To forge an alliance that can succeed, Europeans must break through national, regional and international barriers to fight a global adversary.
The final requirement is to think ahead about changes that will create better stability in the future. If it’s 1941 in terms of the shock, it should be 1944 in terms of planning for the future – devising the post-crisis equivalents of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations that can cope with the explosion of rage that has swept Muslim Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. It’s an interconnected problem, and the solutions require shared, visionary ideas about governance, economic development and global tolerance.
Fix it or lose it. That’s the challenge today for Europe. They won’t get it right without American help. Now is the time to start.