With the European Union facing an increasingly unstable world of hybrid threats, military interventions, terrorism, and organized crime, many politicians across Europe have repeatedly called for closer intelligence cooperation and even for the establishment of an EU intelligence service.
In fact, the EU Global Strategy in 2016 already emphasized the necessity of timely information sharing for security policy decisions being taken at the EU level: “European security hinges on better and shared assessments of internal and external threats,” it states. “This requires investing in intelligence… We must feed and coordinate intelligence extracted from European databases.”

Furthermore, the Implementation Plan on Security and Defense, which was published the same year, confirms that a “European hub for strategic information, early warning and comprehensive analysis” is a necessary security policy instrument. Yet with Britain leaving, the EU is losing a very powerful intelligence partner. As a result, the remaining member states should certainly think about cooperating even more closely.

The Limits of EU Law

So, why not shoot for the moon and establish an EU intelligence service? Since intelligence services are regarded as the heart of a nation state, the EU member states traditionally have been highly reluctant about institutionalized forms of cooperation and set themselves clear legal boundaries.

Article 4 of the Lisbon Treaty states that national security falls under the “sole responsibility of the individual member states.” The relevant regulatory areas “Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice” and “General Provisions on the Union’s External Action and Specific Provisions on the Common Foreign and Security Policy” do not refer to intelligence cooperation at all. However, Article 73 states that member states are free to set up—on their own responsibility—forms of individual cooperation and coordination between their national security authorities. That means that, while a European intelligence service is not an option right now, closer cooperation is legally possible, politically necessary, and practically useful.

In fact, within the clear limits of EU law, two different forms of intelligence cooperation at EU level have developed: on the one hand, there are rather informal bilateral and multilateral forms of cooperation. For instance, the Club de Berne is a forum between the domestic intelligence services of all member states (plus Switzerland and Norway), based on a voluntary exchange of information, experiences, and point of views. Given the high level of trust, flexibility, and independence, those informal intelligence coalitions are probably regarded as the most effective ones.

On the other hand, there are two important institutionalized forms of cooperation within the EU structures. First, the EU maintains a military intelligence unit with the Intelligence Directorate of the EU Military Staff (EUMS INT), which is part of the EU’s foreign and diplomatic body, the European External Action Service (EEAS). It provides military analysis/assessment for the decision making and planning of civilian missions and military operations under the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). Second, there is the EU Intelligence and Analysis Centre (INTCEN), established in 1999 with the CSDP, and another intelligence body of the EEAS. Its mission is to provide intelligence analysis and “situational awareness” to the High Representative, to various EU decision making levels as well as to the EU member states. Neither EUMS INT nor INTCEN generate its own intelligence; rather, they are dependent on information delivered by national foreign and domestic services of the member states and by internal EU bodies.

INTCEN and EUMS INT are linked in the Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC). This is a purely virtual hub within the EEAS but one that works very well. Its products provide significant added value to the member states and to the EU itself. The Implementation Plan on Security and Defense defined SIAC as a central hub for the generation of strategic information and threat assessments: “Improving CSDP responsiveness requires enhanced civil/military intelligence…, through the Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC) as the main European hub for strategic information, early warning, and comprehensive analysis.”

Rocket-Fueling SIAC

By shooting for the moon, the EU will land among the stars. The establishment of a supranational intelligence service would require a substantial change of the EU treaties. Given the results of the European elections and the rising euroskepticism in some of the member states, this, however, seems light years away.

But with the EEAS and the integrated SIAC, the EU actually already has a strengthened role in the analysis of internal and external security threats. The SIAC could be used more efficiently by the member states and optimized by investing in a higher number of staff and in the quantity and quality standard of intelligence products delivered. That would eventually make its added value more visible and would further build trust among member states, encouraging them to cooperate even closer.

But that’s not all. In times of increased global insecurity, two members of the Five Eyes and the EU’s most trustworthy intelligence allies are going down an unforeseeable political path. Both the United States and United Kingdom will surely remain partners in security policy, but in the long term, their respective political isolation might also affect the sharing of confidential information with the EU member states.

What Germany Should Do

Altogether, it is an undeniable fact that in foreign and security terms, the EU will increasingly have to rely on itself. This has already triggered ambitious reactions from 25 member states that committed themselves to “permanent structured cooperation” (PESCO) in defense policy. PESCO could serve as a model for strengthening intelligence cooperation. Closer cooperation would continue to take place in coalitions of small numbers of those member states willing and, more importantly, able to share confidential information with selected partners. Although Article 42 of the EU treaties does not provide a legal basis for a permanent structured cooperation of the intelligence services, Articles 328/329 generally provide a legal basis for enhanced cooperation and maybe for the future creation of Five (preferably six, seven or even more) Eyes of the European Union.

As Germany is taking over the Presidency of the European Council in 2020, the government in Berlin should start focusing now on how flexible cooperative solutions between EU member states could be advanced, leading to deeper integration and toward a real Security Union. This is actually a unique chance for Germany to demonstrate its ability to put innovative policy priorities on the agenda—including a better exchange of intelligence information and coordination at the EU level.

In the end, that might also give a fresh impetus to the concept of a European intelligence service, and make it not quite so many light years away after all.

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© REUTERS/ Hannibal Hanschke

There is little to be seen of Angela Merkel these days. Of course, she receives visitors, and she is also traveling quite a bit. But in terms of shaping the news and setting the agenda, the German chancellor has retreated from the limelight, and her foes and critics—including officials from her own party and administration—are growing bolder.

No place represents Merkel’s loss of authority more acutely than Chemnitz, a city of 240,000 in Saxony. There, three young men from Syria and Iraq—admitted to Germany because of Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy—are suspected of stabbing a German-Cuban man to death at the end of August. After the killing, thousands of people marched through the city in protest, among them several far-right groups. Neo-Nazis chased and beat up dark-skinned foreigners, while others attacked journalists or showed the forbidden Hitler salute.

A horrified Merkel condemned the “hunt” (Hetzjagd in German) on foreigners. But Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer, a politician of Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Party (CDU), publicly contradicted her. There had been “no mob, no Hetzjagd, and no pogrom,” Kretschmer said after a visit to Chemnitz. He did promise that demonstrators who had become “abusive” would be punished.

Kretschmer, at least, is an elected official, and as prime minister of Saxony, he is not under Merkel’s jurisdiction. But just after his intervention, one of the federal government’s top civil servants joined the chorus. Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Germany’s domestic spy agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), gave an astonishing interview to the mass-circulation Bild tabloid.

No Proof?

In the interview, Maassen said that his service had no reliable information that any hunt had taken place in Chemnitz. Nor did they have proof that a video showing right-wing extremists pursuing and hitting foreigners was authentic. “According to my cautious assessment, there are good reasons to believe that this may be targeted misinformation, possibly to distract the public from the murder committed in Chemnitz,” Maassen said.

Maassen had not informed the chancellery before the interview—neither of his doubts about the events in Chemnitz, nor of his intention to make them public. His immediate superior, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, another outspoken critic of Merkel’s refugee policy, at first backed Maassen, but later did ask him to provide proof.

It’s the second time within weeks that Maassen’s impartiality and ability to serve as BfV chief has been called into question: a former member of the right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) claimed that Maassen had advised the party on how to avoid being put under surveillance by his domestic intelligence agency. Maassen has denied doing so, but opposition lawmakers and some journalists have accused him of harboring a too-cozy relationship with Germany’s far-right. The daily Handelsblatt reported this week about alleged leaks to the AfD from within Maassen’s service.

On September 10, the head of the domestic intelligence service finally submitted a brief report to the interior ministry and the chancellery. It was major climb-down, according to news reports: Maassen was apparently forced to explain that he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the video, but that it shouldn’t have been so readily believed without verifying its origin.

What sounds like a rather involved story about semantics and bureaucracy has two possible interpretations. The first is reasonably innocent: Maassen, who has long been worried about the security risks that Germany imported by allowing hundreds of thousands of young men into the country, simply made use of the Chemnitz incident to express his service’s unease. In this case, Maassen may still have to step down, but the affair would stop there.

In the second version, Maassen would have acted with at least some encouragement from his boss, Horst Seehofer. In this case, it wouldn’t just be about a rebellious and overreaching civil servant, but about a power struggle at the heart of Merkel’s government. Seehofer was the politician behind the last rebellion against the chancellor, too. Just before the summer break, he threatened to use his authority as interior minister to close off the border for refugees registered elsewhere in the EU, forcing Merkel to go, cap in hand, to beg for concessions from her EU colleagues.

The Bavarian Angle

In addition to leading the interior ministry, Horst Seehofer is also head of the CSU, the conservative Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats. It is facing regional elections in Bavaria on October 14, and the CSU, which has governed the state for more than 60 years, is doing badly in the polls. If that trend is confirmed in the elections, Seehofer’s party will need a coalition partner to continue governing, which, in Bavarian terms, would be a huge humiliation.

More importantly from Merkel’s perspective, Seehofer will almost certainly have to step down as head of his party if the elections go wrong for the CSU. Down the road, this may rid her of an increasingly unpleasant cabinet member. But in the short term, it means that Seehofer has little left to lose. And he has made no secret of the fact that he dislikes Merkel personally and considers her refugee policy a dreadful mistake. “I cannot work with that woman anymore,” Seehofer said in June.

It is unlikely that Seehofer will actively bring the chancellor down. Time is running short until the Bavarian elections, and Seehofer knows that voters would not thank the CSU for such a step. But he is forcing Merkel to tread extremely carefully, paralyzing the government and making it blatantly obvious how little power the chancellor has left.

Will she be able to recover her grip after October 14? That is certainly possible, though Merkel would need to become much more active and decisive than she has been since her re-election in 2017. But otherwise, bit by bit, her authority will continue to erode. In that case, few people would bet on her completing her current four-year term.

It’s an eventuality that the Social Democrats, her junior partner in government, seem to have factored into their policies already. Over the past several weeks, they have presented far-reaching proposals for new laws—a much more generous pensions system, for instance, or strict rent control for most cities—that are far more suitable to an opposition party or an election campaign than for being part of a stable coalition government.

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(c) REUTERS/Nacho Doce

The United States may yet become a major power in the world of international soccer.

Not on the field, of course – though the American team performed respectably in the 2014 World Cup, it cannot yet be called a threat to Brazil or Germany. Instead, the United States has done something seemingly impossible: it has taken steps to curb corruption at FIFA, the international organization responsible for governing worldwide soccer competitions.

FIFA is perhaps more famous for its questionable business practices than any role it plays in the sport itself. After it selected Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups despite the latter’s completely unsuitable environment and the former’s completely unsuitable government, accusations were made that the organization had accepted bribes from its would-be hosts – The Sunday Times reported two executive committee members offering to sell their votes to Qatar for $1.5 million, and Lord David Triesman, head of the British bid team competing with Russia, said that one committee member even asked to be knighted. The US Justice Department’s 47-count indictment of FIFA includes charges of racketeering, bribery, money laundering, and fraud.

What’s more interesting, though, is how the American investigation was carried out: while FIFA is headquartered in Zurich, it had ties to regional organizations in the Western hemisphere, and a great deal of its money passed through US banks. These international connections allowed the Justice Department to take action, and it did so in cooperation with Swiss authorities, who apparently seized electronic data from the organization’s headquarters to be used in their own parallel investigation. It seems likely that a significant amount of intelligence was shared between different organizations, some across international borders.

This sort of successful cooperation could use a little more fanfare. Since Edward Snowden’s June 2013 revelations about the American National Security Agency’s activities in Europe, much of the discussion about electronic intelligence collection has centered around its undesirability: it’s a tendril of the American empire in Europe, one that occasionally even reaches into the German chancellor’s pocket. The recent scandal in which the German intelligence agency – the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND – was shown to have worked with the American intelligence agencies for some time now proved that the impulse to snoop is not isolated to the US, but did little to improve opinion of the practice in general.

Intelligence sharing and robust data collection capabilities do, however, warrant a broader debate. Whether fighting FIFA or the Islamic State, the ability of security agencies to gather and compare data from a variety of sources will play a prominent role in the future of defense – as it must. It’s the responsibility of the public to discuss the appropriate limitations of that ability in a more nuanced way, one that acknowledges the benefits and costs of both security and privacy.

Efficient intelligence sharing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, or even one counter to the values of liberal democracy: it’s also the most effective tool in combating extremism and differentiating the truly dangerous groups from the merely ambitious. (Germany’s recent experience with the rightwing National Socialist Underground extremist group testifies to that.) And in fact, there’s significant evidence that publics on both sides of the Atlantic support this sort of activity when it’s specifically targeted. The German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends survey found, in September 2013, that 70 percent of Germans and slim majorities in Sweden, France, and the United States opposed their government “collecting the telephone and internet data of its citizens as part of the effort to protect national security”, and a Pew poll carried out in July 2014 echoed these results, with overwhelming majorities in Europe opposed to “monitoring communications, such as emails and phone calls, in the US and many other countries.” However, when Pew asked in the same poll about monitoring the communication of “individuals suspected of terrorist activities,” large majorities on both sides of the Atlantic were actually in favor – even in Germany.

Data collection and dissemination will need to be a part of security planning for the foreseeable future. It’s essential that transatlantic community discuss how exactly it should function and what its limits should be – along with what we want it to achieve.

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