IoT European Security and Privacy Projects: Integration, Architectures and Interoperability

The article analyses Greece's traditional quest for providers of security against the Turkish threat by highlighting the gap between Greece's misguided expectations of turning both the Atlantic Alliance and the developing European defense project into providers of security and real-life cases indicating the inability of those security institutions to meet Greece's expectations. For Greek security analysts and decisionmakers, a series of events has provided ample proof that neither NATO nor the EU can provide Greece with security guarantees. More recently, another series of developments, mostly related to the evolving European security and defense project, was enough to draw Greece into a state of continuous vacillation between widening and bridging the `expectations-reality gap' described above. Following the 1999 EU summit in Helsinki, Greece initiated a long-term policy of removing the Turkish threat altogether. In the long run, this policy appears as the only sound alternative to Greece's longstanding search for security bulwarks, but in the short run Greece should realize the limits of the EU's involvement in its defense policies.

Despite lively debates about the institutional development of the European security architecture, the larger question of the strategic aims it should serve has received less attention. This chapter serves to mitigate this lack. It asks how the EU developed its strategic choices in the security field. Comparing the emergence of both internal and external security strategies, the chapter argues that the process has been capability-driven and not strategy-led, resulting in a ‘capability–strategy’ mismatch. As a result of this strategic void at the heart of the European security project, actors within several policy arenas in the complex EU architecture have been able to develop different – and sometimes conflicting – strategic ends: counter-terrorism, human security, common defence, crime-fighting and stability. Particularly in areas where the EU's Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) agendas overlap, the chapter finds that EU actors follow diverging strategic ends. The chapter finally assesses the effects of this strategy-building process ‘by stealth’ rather than ‘by design’, and concludes that the incremental development of EU security strategies has led to the emergence of fault lines in the EU's security policies.

There is a profound disconnect between the practice and scholarly study of security in Europe. The 2010 Internal Security Strategy added disasters such as forest fires, earthquakes, and floods to the list of European Union (EU) internal security concerns, expanding on the more traditional anxieties over militaries, border protection, and the effects of poverty. This article explores how evolving practices of disaster response, a policy area once separate from EU security discourse, have become part of the EU's wider security provision and with what implications. Based on interviews conducted at the Directorate-General (DG) for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO), it provides a detailed study of three EU disaster response practices – monitoring, training, and information co-ordinating – and their circulation to the wider field of EU internal security provision. It uses this case to outline that new understandings of what it means to “voluntarily co-operate” in European security projects have been radically under-theorized.