Europe doesn't clearly have a security problem. A few insane people committing political violence doesn't change the fact that Europe is among the safest places on the planet.
Devil's advocate for the Internet. I'd say that our being so connected helps spread and magnify these fears, and the fact that most of us carry smartphones et cetra helps keep us consistently in that state of mind.
At a data level, you are more likely to die or be injured in a politically-motivated attack today than you were 10 years ago. Attacks are now more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more deadly - even if only on a very small percentage level.
Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.
Anyone can make a trend by selecting their date range. In the 70's in Ireland:
In 1972, there were over 12,000 shooting and bombing attacks in Northern Ireland; by 1977, this was down to 2,800.[41] In 1976, there were 297 deaths in Northern Ireland; in the next three years the figures were 112, 81, and 113.
> Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.
Just because some number has increased, that doesn't say anything about whether it will increase further, and if so, at which rate. So: How do you know there is a trend in the first place?
Nor do we know if it has reached the level of "problem" or not. Murders could be up 100% but if it's from "negligible" to "negiligible x2" then it is not "clearly a problem".
You clearly didn't live in the '70s or early '80s Europe. I was born in '79 but the signs of political violence from those decades were all around me while growing up in Italy. That menace was somehow controllable through intelligence and surveillance, because it was mostly coherent; this wave is completely different. Intelligence will never catch bullied 18-year-olds and disenfranchised taxi-driver lunatics before they do something stupid. What you need is a stronger society where people are willing to talk to "differents" as much as to their own little tribes.
Ah yes, and you are more likely to injure yourself playing a video game or hitting a parked police car [0] in the past week than you were 10 years ago. Self-harm from inattention is more frequent and more dispersed these days. We should probably only let people play games like Pokemon Go if they're not moving or driving or walking in a street.
But seriously, no one is saying they don't want to "reverse" things. There are just many ways to do that that actually solve the issue (old fashioned going out and getting the bad guys?) that don't diminish our rights.
For most of the last 20 years, fatalities in terrorist attacks in (Western) Europe were in single figures. There were three exceptions - the Madrid trains in 2004, London bombings in 2005, and the Oslo shootings in 2011.
While I tend to shrug off any attack with the idea that I still live in one of the safest corners of the planet (Small-town Norway), I do appreciate that people are, reasonably, more scared of Terrorism(tm) than they've been in the past around here.
I have a couple of ideas why this may be so:
a) Back in the seventies/eighties when media reported on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the ETA in Spain or the RAF in Germany / BR in Italy, reporting was much more low key (For anything but the most spectacular events, Norwegian papers would typically publish a small note to the effect that "Members of the Basque separatist organization ETA today killed a police officer and two bystanders in whatever Spanish place you've never heard of."
Today if someone for whatever reason kills a couple of people, it is a major story with photos, interviews, analysis and whatnot. Hence, events on a similar scale as was experienced in the past now appear much more significant.
b) Violence today seems a lot more arbitrary; in the seventies, the typical terrorism victim if my recollection of the news back then is anything to go by, was someone who was targeted for something they were; police officers, magistrates, cabinet members, Israelis, whatever.
Hence we'd just shrug it off, as we weren't targets, anyway.
Today, for a significant number of perpetrators, anyone is a target - and that makes it a lot harder to just shrug an attack off as something which does not affect you; three people get blown up in a bar in Elbonia? Could've been you; after all you went to the neighbourhood pub only yesterday!
c) Additionally, as much (if not all) terrorism today appears motivated by religion (or, more precisely, by some perverted interpretation of religion), it is a godsend to anyone of a xenophobic bent. Get rid of the people you do not like; get rid of the terrorism problem at the same time!
Militant islamism basically makes xenophobia legitimate, which in turn can be argued to foster militantism, which further fosters xenophobia and downwards we go.
