The Development of the Terrorist Threat in Western Europe, 1968–89

Abstract

Since the late 1960s Western Europe has had the unenviable reputation of being one of the most severely afflicted areas of the world by the terrorist phenomenon. Between 1969 and 1988, the number of international terrorist acts in the region totalled 3629 — 33.2 per cent of the global share (see Tables A1 and A4 in Appendix). With respect to domestic incidents, the EC Twelve suffered a total of 8842 attacks between 1980 and 1986, resulting in the deaths of some 354 people (see Table A6 in Appendix). The most complete, publicly available breakdown of international and domestic terrorist incidents in Western Europe for the period 1968–88 are the statistics provided by Alex Jongman. He records a total of at least 80 481 incidents occurring in the five most severely affected Western European countries — the UK (including Northern Ireland), Italy, France, Germany and Spain (the figures for which are not included).1 These attacks resulted in 4032 deaths of which 66 per cent occurred in Northern Ireland, 10 per cent in Italy, 3 per cent in France, 3 per cent in Germany and 16 per cent in Spain (see Table A7 in Appendix). In terms of incident type, a total of 455 assassinations, 1166 attempted assassinations, 44 hijackings and 5432 bombings were suffered by the EC states between 1974 and 1985. Most of these attacks occurred in the above five states which accounted for 85 per cent of the assassinations, 98 per cent of the attempted assassinations, 88 per cent of the hijackings and 95 per cent of the bombings (see Table A8 in Appendix).