FRANCE: How vulnerable is Europe to Paris-style attacks?

The cancellation of the football match in Hannover on Tuesday night was the latest expression of a terrorist fear that currently wracks Europe.

Coming after a long month in which major attacks were seen in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, Beirut, Baghdad, Ankara, and Paris, the febrile environment has generated an understandable level of concern that means people in major cities across Europe feel concern that they might fall into terrorist harm.

Yet, the reality is that people face a greater daily danger from using their cars than they do from falling foul of terrorist plots in a European capital.

While the current environment is of heightened concern given attempts by Islamic State (IS) and its affiliates to massacre innocents, the reality is that plots on the scale of Paris are a rarity.

In response, European security agencies will step up their already highly vigilant posture and move to disrupt networks at increasingly earlier stages.

Outside the norm

Terrorism in European capitals is not unheard of.

Since the attacks of 11 September 2001 in Washington and New York, Madrid, London, Moscow, Oslo, and now Paris have faced large-scale terrorist atrocities.

Yet, these events are outside the usual norm.

In contrast, cities in Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East face more regular misery.

More usually also terrorist plots in the west are disrupted - especially large-scale ones involving large networks of individuals.

In the United Kingdom alone, while the 7 July 2005 bombers succeeded in killing 52 people, they were part of a wave of at least four or five large-scale plots that were disrupted by authorities with links to al-Qaeda core that were to strike the UK between 2004 and 2006. 

'Lone actors'

More recently concerns had focused around the phenomenon of "lone actor" terrorism - or terrorism undertaken by individuals who did not demonstrate any clear direction from a terrorist group or network.

Sometimes, the individuals proved to be part of a known radical community, but in other cases, they were unknowns who had driven themselves towards terrorist activity.

And yet, while numerous such cases were disrupted, only three were able to murder fellow citizens - Pavlo Lapshyn stabbed Mohammed Saleem to death in Birmingham, while Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo ran over and publicly beheaded Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

In most cases, the individuals were only able to injure themselves in their attempted attacks.

In the decade since the 7 July 2005 bombings, only two people in the mainland UK have died as a result of terrorist attacks.

Difficult to disrupt

IS had noticed this phenomenon, and one of the major concerns of the past few months had been the ability of individuals in the group to inspire and instigate people in the West to launch such isolated attacks.

France had faced a number of these, including a spate of attempted murders around Christmas last year.

The authorities in the UK were, in contrast, able to disrupt a number of such suspected plots and so far they have only been able to produce fairly limited casualties in the cities they have been able to strike.

From the authorities' perspectives, such plots are inherently harder to disrupt, given the individuals' lack of connections and links to known networks, meaning intelligence tripwires were harder to identify.

Yet at the same time, these plots also tend to be less menacing in their ability to cause mass murder.

Anders Behring Breivik was an exception to this, but he remains unique in his attacks in Norway in 2010 that left 77 people dead.

In most cases, the individuals are only able to attempt to murder one or two in their immediate periphery.

Shifting focus

Clearly, recent events in continental Europe show that the current threat picture there is more heightened than this, but plots on the scale of the slaughter in Paris remain a rarity.

While IS is clearly a terrorist organisation that has shifted its attention from state building in its core in the sands of the Levant to causing mass murder globally, the degree to which the group is able to get such large-scale plots through European security nets remains unclear.

In the wake of the atrocity in Paris, it will become even harder for the group as authorities move to disrupt plots earlier rather than let something like Paris happen.

At the same time, the current threat picture is heavily engorged, with hundreds of Europeans and others fighting alongside IS having absorbed the groups ideology.

It is unclear how many more such plotters will need to be faced and for how long Europe will face this menace.

Raffaello Pantucci is Director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in London. His research focuses on counter-terrorism as well as China's relations with its Western neighbours.