Romania and the European Security Equation

Against the background of last weeks terrorist attacks in the French capital city, the director of the Romanian Intelligence Service, George Maior, talks in an interview about Romanias place and role in the European security framework.

România Internațional, 13.01.2015, 14:12

There will be more terror attacks in Europe. Terror attacks have been foiled in Romania as well. European intelligence services are prepared to deal with a new level of terrorism, but there is no such thing as absolute security. Sometimes terror attacks cannot be prevented. Those are some of the things that the director of the Romanian Intelligence Service, George Maior has pointed out in an interview with the Romanian web portal ziare.com.

According to George Maior, there is no high risk of terror attacks in Romania at present, for which reason the country’s Intelligence Service has not raised the alert level. However, some additional measures have been taken to defend potential targets, to thoroughly control traffic at checkpoints and to gather more information about developments on the country’s territory, to name just a few. “People”, George Maior says, “must understand that we do whatever we can to maintain the current alert level and to prevent such events from happening on our territory. That is why we act strategically.” In the same interview, the director of the Romanian Foreign Intelligence has said the attacks in Paris will have effects at European level, such as increased cooperation among the European intelligence services and the drawing up of a new European plan aimed at strengthening the capacity of European states and the EU to deal with such events.

“Setting up stronger intelligence structures within the EU is being considered, and I believe there will be changes in this respect, including legislative ones,” George Maior has said. In his opinion, it is possible that last week’s events in Paris should have effects even on Romania’s accession to the Schengen area.

In geopolitical terms, George Maior says, Romania is faced with two major threats. The first one is related to the crisis in Crimea, Russia’s neo-imperial policy and the instability in Ukraine. The second threat comes from the Middle East, more precisely from the Islamic State, because of the problems in Syria and the proliferation of terrorism, which has reached Europe. In George Maior’s opinion, those two serious threats should be dealt with in a different manner, but with the same intensity in terms of priorities, even if, after an event like the one in France, public opinion tends to focus more on terrorism and less on the geopolitical structural problems in the East.