Politics & Power Quote by Gijs de Vries

Control is the quiet obsession behind every post-9/11 security architecture, and de Vries is naming it without apology. The line reads like a procedural reassurance, but it’s really a boundary marker: counterterrorism can be coordinated, harmonized, even “Europeanized,” yet the coercive instruments of the state stay national. Police, intelligence, prosecutors, judges - the whole chain from surveillance to sentencing - remains domestically owned.

The intent is political triage. De Vries, working in an EU context where cooperation is constantly proposed and constantly feared, is soothing two anxieties at once: citizens’ fear of terrorism and governments’ fear of losing sovereignty. The subtext is that terrorism is transnational, but legitimacy is not. Democracies still anchor accountability in national parliaments, national courts, national scandals. An EU-level agency can share data or set frameworks, but if something goes wrong - an unlawful detention, a botched raid, a politicized prosecution - blame must be containable. Better to keep the hot-wire powers close to home.

It also signals a deliberate limit on supranational ambition. “Full control” isn’t just descriptive; it’s a warning to integrationists and a nod to skeptics: no European FBI, no Brussels-run security state. The phrase wraps an uncomfortable truth in bureaucratic calm: cooperation is welcome until it touches the monopoly on legitimate force. Counterterrorism, in this framing, becomes the place where the EU’s promise of collective action meets the member states’ refusal to share the sharpest tools.