Terrorism’smeasure in Europe has changed
In decades past, the radicalismwas political— and the death toll was worse
A truck rampage kills 86 on Nice’s famed French Riviera. Carefully coordinated mass shootings leave 130 dead at cafes and at a Paris concert hall. Eight die in a stabbing spree outside pubs and restaurants in London. A lowtech suicide bomb at a concert in Manchester kills 22 people, many of them teenagers.
These high- profile attacks inWestern Europe have triggered the terror the Muslim perpetrators intended, produced massive media coverage, unleashed a backlash against Islam and propelled governments to devote huge resources to prevent future random assaults on their citizens.
The public hysteria, however, masks the fact that the number of attacks and deaths from terrorism in Western Europe is down significantly from 20 to 40 years ago, when political radicalism rather than religious fanaticism was the spark.
The region was targeted by 604 terror attacks that killed 383 people in 2015 and 2016, according to the most recent figures compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database.
In 1979 and 1980, by contrast, 1,615 terrorist incidents killed at least 719, the most attacks and deaths since the database began tracking attacks in 1970.
“Terrorism in Western Europe remains less frequent compared to the number of attacks that took place in the region in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s,” said Erin Miller, a researcher who manages the database.
This year, at least 39 Europeans have died in 11 terror attacks.
Most of this year’s terror incidents are the work of Islamic extremists, either natives or immigrants motivated by radical groups, such as the Islamic
State, which have declared war on Western values.
Terrorists in past decades were political fanatics or agents of state- sponsored attacks, including Northern Ireland’s Irish Republican Army, Spain’s Basque separatists, Italian radicals and Libyan agents’ bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Although random attacks understandably cause great public alarm, research shows that the chances of being killed by a terrorist inWestern Europe are extremely slim compared with terrorist hot spots in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria and Pakistan, according to PeaceTech Lab/ Esri Story Maps.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Africa since 1970, about a third of the global total. In Europe, the figure is at least 6,400.
“Our societies in North America and Western Europe have managed over the course of the last century to reduce the risks of a wide range of factors commonly associated with death,” said Robert Muggah, a security specialist and co- founder of the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think tank that computed the probability findings. “We know earthquakes and floods kill far more people than terrorism, but we give a huge amount of attention to terrorism. ... It whips our society, which is a low- risk society, into a kind of frenzy and augments the perceived risk.
“Treating some of these events as crime events, which is ultimately what they are ... would be a much more effective response.”