Visas and Walls. Nazli Avdan
external borders of the Schengen Area. Pundits became alarmed that EU citizens would endure significantly higher logistical travel costs, including longer wait times, and systematic checks on identification documents. The United Kingdom, an EU member not part of the Schengen Area, criticized the proposals on the grounds that its citizens would bear the brunt of the burden.
Moreover, states that border volatile regions encounter pressure from the international community to shore up border controls. After the ISIS staged the Paris attacks, the United States and EU countries called for Turkey to crack down on its perforated border with Syria. Then U.S. defense secretary Ashton B. Carter stated about Turkey, “The single most important contribution that their geography makes necessary is the control of their own border” (Arango 2015). Thus the connection between terrorist events and harder borders is not unfounded. Nevertheless, such an automatic linkage misses the fact that policy instruments serve different functions. In other words, border strategies differ in how they allow states to express territorial sovereignty. Consequently, it would be misleading to expect uniform policy change.
Border management strategies vary according to the nature of the terrorist threat. More precisely, restrictive policies are more likely if terrorist events are salient. Violence that hits closer to home and is easily observable by the public is more likely to spur policy tightening because such events are more likely to push policymakers to take action. In other words, events that directly imperil state interests more acutely galvanize public anxieties, stoking fears over loss of control. Direct threats inflate the emblematic role that border control can play in tamping public anxiety. Previous scholarship has not shed much light on these distinct pathways insofar as it assumes an unqualified linkage between terrorism and border closure. By distinguishing terrorist events by venue of attack and nationality of victims, I argue that the impact of terrorism on border management is contingent upon whether threats are direct or global.
We might also expect material incentives to counter policy tightening. September 11’s deleterious effects on economic exchange within the NAFTA area left a lasting impression. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States introduced harsher border measures (Andreas 2003b). As a result, traffic across the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico slowed to a trickle. As Andreas and Nadelman (2006) stress, this was not the first time that a crackdown by the United States halted cross-border traffic in North America; Operation Intercept, an anti–drug trafficking endeavor, three decades earlier had virtually shut down the border with Mexico. What was more significant about the post-9/11 case, however, was that it occurred in the context of economic interdependence, institutionalized and propelled through NAFTA. There are more recent examples where policymakers voiced alarm that terrorist attacks and their aftermath would throttle trade. The aforementioned Ottawa shooting, for example, triggered fears that border checks and red tape would stymie U.S.-Canada trade. Likewise, these fears surfaced in the wake of the June 2015 attacks in Tunisia as well as after the November 2015 Paris assaults (Bensemra 2016). The fears were not unwarranted: Tunisia witnessed a significant decrease in tourism inflows during the rest of 2015 (Kim 2015).
Economic interdependence and openness raise the costs of draconian border policies. Their effects on state behavior, however, are not uniform. The costs are expected to be lopsided insofar as states are asymmetrically interdependent (Gelpi and Grieco 2008). Consider the disproportionate effects of 9/11 within NAFTA, for example (Andreas 2009, 164). The economic costs of border delays for Canada were much higher than for the United States. Bilateral trade for Canada comprises 87 percent of its total trade. By comparison, for the United States, the figure stands at 25 percent. The asymmetric commercial relationship can be expressed in terms of trade to GDP ratio. Forty percent of Canada’s GDP comes from (is tied to) its U.S.-bound exports. In sharp contrast, only 2.5 percent of U.S. GDP comes from its exports to Canada.
States strive for a balance between borders that remain open to economic exchange but yet are impregnable to penetration by undesirables. The balance also hinges on whether threats are diffuse or targeted. Before delving into the interplay between security and objectives, we need to spell out why transnational terrorism should predict tighter controls and hardened borders.
Transnational Terrorism
Terrorism is the “anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby … the direct targets of violence are not the main targets” (Schmid and Jongman 1988, 28). The audience of terrorist violence is broader than the immediate targets of attacks. In other words, the victims are not always the intended targets of the terrorist actors but individuals who are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time (Sanchez-Cuenca and Calle 2009).3 The latter aspect is why the repercussions of terrorist events transcend the physical damage and carnage caused by the incidents. By intimidating an audience greater than the victims of attacks, and by promising further violence to come, terrorist actors aim to intimidate and force policy change from target governments (Pape 2006).
In terms of military capabilities, terrorism is the strategy of the weak (Hoffman 1998). Terrorist groups, even when they solidify territorial control and draw on a global pool of recruits, cannot amass military capabilities that match those of state actors. They make use of transnational organizations to leverage borders to their advantage. They foment uncertainty over when and where attacks might occur through the stealth element. They explicitly seek to catch states unaware in order to cast doubt on their ability to protect. They do so by making use of individuals to transport violence across states. The degree of damage inflicted can be on par with that of state actors (Salehyan 2008b). By doing so, they highlight states’ strategic vulnerability in the face of non-state threats. Gearson writes that the September 11 militants “utilized the long-established terrorist approach of careful planning, simple tactics, and operational surprise, to effect the most stunning terrorist ‘spectacular’ in history” (2002, 7).
Transnational terrorism takes advantage of the processes of globalization. It also shares the stealth element in common with other types of non-state threats—or clandestine transnational actors (CTAs). CTAs include relatively harmless actors such as undocumented immigrants or refugees, more harmful actors such as smugglers and human traffickers, and more imminent security threats such as insurgents and terrorists. Border strategies are increasingly geared toward inhibiting access to such actors. As such, the theoretical connection between transnational terrorism and border control leverages insights about borders as preventive barriers against atypical threats (Andreas 2003a; Jones and Johnson 2016). Harder borders impede the movement of CTAs across borders by raising the costs of entry and increasing the likelihood of apprehension by state agents (Hassner and Wittenberg 2015). These policies aim to deny such actors access to territory. Terrorism, however, is on the dangerous end of the continuum of CTAs. Organized crime, for instance, may prey upon and detract from the legal economy, but terrorism is distinct in that it can cost lives, damage property and infrastructure, and even degrade the health of the country’s economy (Enders and Sandler 2006b).
I contend that three interrelated features of transnational terrorism are important for understanding why transnational terrorist events prompt tighter border policies: (1) nonhierarchical spread, (2) stealth, and (3) psychological import. I flesh out each component in the sections that follow and then discuss why directed and global terrorist events have distinctive effects on the state’s responses to violence.
Nonhierarchical Spread
Transnational terrorism, by definition, involves crossing borders. As the preceding discussion illustrated, when a transnational terrorist event transpires, either the perpetrators or victims cross frontiers (Li 2005). In addition, transnational terrorist groups are nonhierarchically networked across multiple states and sometimes multiple regions (Enders and Su 2007). Groups can mobilize, recruit, and train in bases spread across several countries. Even if a terrorist group is initially limited to a specific region, it can evolve over time to develop offshoots or branches elsewhere. A noteworthy example is ISIS, which the international community initially hoped would remain confined to the Levant. After the Paris attacks, attention turned to the group’s external operations branch in Europe (Callimachi, Rubin, and Fourquet 2016).
To be sure, transnational networking does