Engene, Jan Oskar. Terrorism in Western Europe: Explaining the Trends Since 1950.
Cobane, Craig T.
Engene, Jan Oskar. Terrorism in Western Europe: Explaining the
Trends Since 1950. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2004.
vii + 200 pages. Cloth, $95.00.
It comes as no great revelation: The distribution of terrorist
attacks in Europe is uneven. What surprises many is the lack of a
discernible pattern for terrorism across the continent. To address this
puzzle, political scientist Jan Oskar Engene created, as the core of his
doctoral research, a dataset of terrorist attacks in Western Europe. His
dataset is known as Terrorism in Western Europe: Event Data (TWEED).
Engene uses these data to examine his primary research question: Why
have some Western European countries experienced more terrorism than
others? (p. 2). He limits the scope of his research by focusing only on
terrorist attacks from 1950 to 1995.
Drawing upon a communication model of understanding terrorism,
Engene argues that terrorism is closely related to the notion of state
legitimacy. The use of violence is a method of communicating with
various societal groups in order to influence the loyalty between
populations in society (p. 21). Specifically, terrorists use
"communicative violence" to strengthen or weaken bonds of
loyalty between selected groups and the state. The message is
situationally contextual, but is focused on affecting the overall
legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the target audience. Engene sees
the main threat to legitimacy as stemming from how the state addresses
various tensions resulting from a half-century of development. He
concludes that Western European terrorism in the second half of the
twentieth century is a consequence of modernization. Included within
this rubric are increases in freedom, democratization, and economic
development.
The book is organized in three sections: defining and explaining
terrorism, elucidating the TWEED dataset, and analyzing a series of
Western European case studies. The opening section of the volume, with
its required discussion of the myriad debates on a definition of
terrorism and theoretical understanding of the concept, is solid. The
second section, an in-depth analysis and discussion of his dataset, is
impressive both in its depth and scope and provides the book's most
important contribution to the literature. Engene's three-part
operationalization of the severity of terrorism is especially useful. He
examines his variables as they are related to number of terrorist acts,
number of deaths caused, and number of years a particular terrorist
campaign endures. He further delineates terrorism by characterizing it
in terms of its ideological and ethnic motivations. Unfortunately, the
final and most important portion of the book, consisting of case studies
and data analysis, does not reach the level of the previous two and
leaves the reader wanting.
When Engene's conclusions are broken down, his research
demonstrates a positive relationship between terrorism and measures of
freedom and democracy. His analysis found that low levels of freedom,
human rights, and democracy were associated with higher levels of
terrorism (p. 97). However, on this point the data leave some wiggle
room. For example, Engene found a strong correlation between terrorism
and human rights, but only in terms of number of years of terrorism, not
the number of acts or people killed. Throughout the analysis, not
surprisingly, the correlation was stronger for ideological terrorism
than for ethnic terrorism (p. 81).
A subset of this argument posits the problems of continuity as a
society's transition to democracy may produce a more conducive
environment for terrorism (pp. 38-39). It is an interesting point, and
similar to portions of the Democracy and War literature, which argues
that, although democracies do not go to war with other democracies,
newly established or transitioning democracies are more likely to go to
war. Unfortunately, the author does not reach out to this set of
literature to support and expand upon his point.
Engene's research found that economic development and income
inequality were strongly correlated to acts of terrorism. The
introduction of modern capitalist economic policy leading to overall
expansion of the economic sector, measured as real growth in GDP, was
positively associated with acts of terrorism. Again, the correlation was
more pronounced with ideological terrorism than with ethnic terrorism
(p. 168). A similar trend line was uncovered when the author compared
terrorism to income distribution. The tendency was clear: The countries
with the greater inequality in terms of income distribution had the
highest levels of terrorism (p. 88).
The book is well-written and is organized and structured in a
manner which makes obvious the project's origin as a dissertation.
The prose is solid and readable, if somewhat mechanical. Although more a
comment on the publisher than the author, there are a surprising number
of editorial gaffes e.g., stating that the book is looking at trends in
"terrorism in Western Europe since 1995" (p. 1, passim).
Overall, the book is accessible and usable to a range of readers, from
undergraduate to professional scholars.
In sum, Engene's work will bring modest contributions to the
literature, especially the aforementioned dataset, but the book is not
without its limitations. The most disappointing was the author's
decision not to update his dataset and the analysis past 1995. An
examination of events in Europe after September 11, 2001 would have
improved the book's overall value. The one-paragraph mention of
9/11 and the ongoing War on Terrorism does not do justice to events
affecting terrorism in Western Europe. This reviewer sincerely hopes
that the author will extend his dataset to include recent events in the
Netherlands, Great Britain, and Spain to see if his findings related to
terrorism in the second half of the twentieth century hold true in the
first years of the new millennium. An additional weakness is the
near-total lack of any policy prescriptions related to his findings. The
author elucidates on a number of interesting correlations which have
potential real-world implications, but makes no real attempt to suggest
ways to address structural circumstances leading to the use of violence.
On balance, the author's findings and research outweigh the
book's flaws, and the book should be a part of any serious
collection of works on the subject of terrorism.
Craig T. Cobane, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science
Western Kentucky University
Bowling Green, Kentucky
