Terrorist and Non-terrorist Threats to European Security

Abstract

When we talk about European Security, we take it for granted that we all know what “Europe” means. Yet we might not all have the same Europe in mind: is it about the defense of territory or the defense of European values? Almost until the 18th century, our peninsula to the west of Asia, was generally not known as Europe but known as the land of Christendom or Christianity. Only when it began to sink into the minds of more and more people that there was a whole other world out there, beyond the Atlantic and the Urals, and when the new thinking of the enlightenment took broader roots, the peculiar geographic and cultural nature of Europe became more apparent.