Hard security measures not enough to tackle terrorism: Bulgarian MP

Hard security measures would not be sufficient to deal with terrorism, and the European Union (EU) should play a stronger role in international affairs, a Bulgarian lawmaker said here on Tuesday.

Kristian Vigenin, a member of the foreign policy committee of the Bulgarian National Assembly, said countries like the United States after Sept. 11, 2001 and Israel introduced legislations "which, from our perspective, were very restrictive."

Now, when Europe finds itself in a similar situation, the EU will begin to introduce many of these measures, said Vigenin, who was a member of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2013, and Bulgaria's foreign minister from May 2013 to August 2014.

However, he was worried the first response of national institutions against the terrorist threat was to focus on so-called hard security, Vigenin said.

According to him, the effective fight against the root causes of terrorism required a much more comprehensive approach.

"If we focus on the fight against the consequences, we will never actually reach a solution to our problems," Vigenin said.

A better approach, he said, would be to "have a very serious analysis and measures related to the integration patterns that are different in the different EU member states, but we see that in some of them they work worse than in others."

Second, the EU and its member states should play a stronger role in international affairs, he said.

Due to its passive approach to international security, the EU is seen as a donation box for money, Vigenin said.

The EU has given money in conflict zones, helping to temporarily recover turbulent situations there, but after some time these situations returned to the same stage they were in before, he said.

This instability in regions around Europe eventually brought the problem to the EU, and "we currently have no adequate response to this problem, which, as we see, in fact can no longer be solved with just money," Vigenin said. Endit