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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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freedom and security has been tipping in an in-
creasingly visible manner towards a cut in the
framework of fundamental rights that define us
as open societies with the promise (a false one,
as it is impossible) of complete security for all. It
is an old method, but, unfortunately, no less ef-
fective for that; in such a way that under the
paralysing effect of the fear of suffering a terror-
ist attack that is presented to us as imminent, we
tend to lose sight of reality –a reality that insists
on reminding us, we who have the privilege of
forming part of the European Union (EU) as
members of the most exclusive club on the plan-
et in terms of welfare and security, that there are
many other security challenges to which we are
not providing an adequate response.
Therefore, if we take human life as the yard-
stick to gauge the seriousness of the threats af-
flicting us and as an asset of incalculable value
that must be preserved above all other consid-
erations, we can come to the conclusion that
we are not prioritising the issues that really con-
cern us appropriately. Looking within the EU it-
self, the growing inequality gap in our societies
is by far such a top-tier problem that it may up-
set our much-envied model of economic and
socio-political organisation. Looking beyond the
EU, we can immediately see that none of the
threats and risks that we had identified over 20
years ago now has disappeared; on the contra-
ry, they are growing stronger by the day be-
cause of glaring neglect.
We do not live in a safer, more just and more
sustainable world today than when we were
subject to the balance of power between the
two contenders for world leadership and no-
body can consider themselves satisfied with the
level of effort made to remedy the ills that afflict
us. Without the slightest hint of demagogy or
populism, one only need remember that there
are 2.6 billion people in the world who do not
have access to a basic toilet and we know only
too well that it means that every year more than
800,000 children under five die because of
something as simple as diarrhoea. Hundreds of
thousands of women are raped every year with-
out any consequence. Are those lives any less
valuable than those lost in a terrorist attack? Are
they more difficult to preserve than those that
the violent jihadis put at risk? We face constant
dangers and we must consider what resources
we allocate to tackle each one of them, without
giving way to self-interested and selective hyste-
ria that ignores implementing solutions that are
within our reach (such as those already men-
tioned, or the elimination of hunger in the
world) and which leads us to obsessively chan-
nel resources and time into one problem alone,
which, as has already been said, is not the one
that causes most human suffering.
In short, as a result of that disturbing ap-
proach, which is still in good health today, secu-
rity has once again acquired a clear militaristic
bent and the spectrum of threats has once
again been reduced to one: terrorism. If at the
beginning of the last decade everything ap-
peared to boil down to Al-Qaeda, today it is
DAESH that serves the same purpose.
Threats and responses
Despite the insistence on rhetoric that magnifies
violent jihadism, portraying it as the embodi-
ment of the only threat worthy of being taken
into consideration and as a hierarchical network
united in a common cause, it is useful to recall
that, on the contrary, there is a multiple reality.
There are many groups that could be described
with the term, but there is nothing to confirm
the existence of a cohesive and homogenous
jihadi international, other than that many of