Time & Perspective Quote by Gijs de Vries

“Mostly domestic” is doing the real work here: it’s a corrective to a reflexive storyline in which terrorism is imported, foreign, and conveniently other. Coming from Gijs de Vries, an EU security policymaker shaped by the post-9/11 moment, the phrasing reads as a deliberate reframing of threat perception. Europe’s security debate in the early 2000s often leaned on border control and the specter of external enemies; de Vries pulls the camera back to show a continent whose violence has repeatedly been homegrown.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s an argument for institutional maturity: if Europe has a “long and tragic history,” then counterterrorism can’t be improvised as a wartime exception. It has to be built into policing, intelligence-sharing, and legal norms without tearing up civil liberties in a panic. Second, it’s a political intervention against scapegoating. By emphasizing domestic origins, he undercuts the idea that terrorism is primarily an immigration problem and nudges governments toward confronting radicalization, extremism, and political violence within their own societies.

The subtext is uncomfortable accountability. Europe’s past includes anarchist waves, separatist campaigns (IRA, ETA), far-right attacks, and state-adjacent violence in the Cold War’s “strategy of tension.” Calling it “mostly domestic” insists that European democracies have long generated their own threats - and therefore can’t outsource blame.

Rhetorically, the sentence is blunt, almost bureaucratic, which is precisely why it lands: it drains terror talk of melodrama and replaces it with history, a quiet rebuke to policies built on fear rather than evidence.