On the face of it, jihadi terrorism cannot win in Europe. Even if thousands of young people have headed to the Middle East to join Isis, this is a tiny proportion of Europe’s Muslim population as a whole.
The French scholar Olivier Roy is probably right when he says that it is radicalism that is being Islamicised in European countries, rather than Islam being radicalised. And, as was the case with leftwing violence in the 1970s, effective counter-terrorism policies should be sufficient to deal with the jihadi challenge today.
Unfortunately, this line of reasoning overlooks the fact that Isis wants to trigger civil war in Europe, transforming its recruits into the armed vanguard of disaffected Muslim populations. But it will be able to do this only if a misguided response by European governments and societies plays into its hands. Until the Paris attacks of January and November 2015, governments had generally avoided this trap, refraining from launching a George W Bush-style “war on terror”. Instead, they have worked to bring Muslim communities into the mainstream.
Since last year’s attacks, however, France has been moving in the other direction. The government of President François Hollande has consistently refused to launch a wide-ranging investigation into why the attacks were not thwarted. Such an inquiry would have addressed significant shortcomings in the response of the emergency services, along with the failure to provide the public with timely and relevant information as the outrages were unfolding.
Presumably the government fears the reputational damage that would be inflicted by the disclosure of insufficient preparation and poor management. Yet lack of openness will be far more corrosive. Although a parliamentary inquiry was set up in the teeth of official opposition, it can go only so far if the administration continues to stonewall.
Even worse has been the government’s attempt to introduce a constitutional amendment that would have stripped of their citizenship people with dual nationality found guilty of terrorist offences. Mr Hollande was eventually forced to withdraw this measure — which would have created a tier of second-class citizens, many of them of north African origin — after months of divisive debate.
The government has been more successful in extending the state of emergency introduced after the attacks in November. It has transformed what began as a shortlived strategic retreat from democratic due process into a semi-permanent dispensation. The state of emergency will be extended for a third time to cover the Euro 2016 football championships in June and July.
It is likely Mr Hollande will extend it for a fourth time in order to cover the presidential primaries to be held by the right-of-centre Republicans in November, and then through to the general election next year. Meanwhile, the state of emergency has been applied more vigorously in the deprived and ethnically diverse suburbs of the big cities than elsewhere.
Mr Hollande and Manuel Valls, the prime minister, have also been beating the rhetorical drums of war. But bombing Raqqa and liberating Mosul are one thing; waging war on Frenchcitizens in Saint-Denis or Belgians in Molenbeek is quite another.
France can still change tack. Launching an official investigation into the 2015 attacks would be a start; as would revamping the intelligence services, working towards greater cross-border intelligence sharing, lifting the state of emergency, dropping the war-on-terror rhetoric and moving towards affirmative action for French Muslims rather than worsening discrimination. But time is running out.
The writer is author of ‘Comment Perdre la Guerre contre le Terrorisme’