Policing, Securitization and Democratization in Europe

The field of European policing

Consider the following: the movement across borders of illicit drugs ranging from contraband alcohol and tobacco to ecstasy, cocaine and heroin; expanding transnational markets in vehicles and other stolen goods; the smuggling of nuclear materials; the endeavours of economic migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers from eastern Europe and beyond to enter member-states of the European Union (EU); the organized trafficking of human beings by global criminal enterprises - often to work in the sex industries of Europe’s cities; the circulation through the global economy of laundered money and forged currency; the persistence, in different forms, of organized political violence; outbreaks of ethnic conflict and warfare on the EU’s ‘doorstep’ in the Balkans. These threats whirl around our heads, threatening the security and prosperity of (western) Europe and its citizens. They are the criminogenic consequences of a world made-up of flows and networks rather than boundaries and fixed points and, as such, repeatedly and decisively outstrip the capacity of any single nation-state to mount or sustain an effective response. The ability of ‘sovereign’ states to accomplish one their constituent functions - the production of internal order and security - is correspondingly being eroded and undermined.

In opening with this list, couched in these terms, I am of course begging the very questions I want in this paper to raise and reflect upon. I do so only to indicate the mix of ‘public narratives’ (den Boer, 1994) and ‘official fears’ (Ruggiero, 2000) that have in recent years been mobilized to justify and defend the slow and uneven, yet also discernible and significant, emergence of an enhanced policing capacity within and across Europe.[1] Centred mainly - though not exclusively - around the European Union (and, as such, tied-up with the unfolding development of this unique political order), this process has resulted in the dispersal across borders of the means of legitimate surveillance and violence. It has, in so doing, served to loosen the connections between police, nation and sovereign statehood that have for some 200 years been central to the making and imagining of modern European states. The key developments might best be introduced using the following - familiar - categories:

i)Informal professional networks. Historically, this stands as the most established mode of international police cooperation. Following unsuccessful moves to develop such cooperation in the late nineteenth century, it was eventually given institutional form, first, in the International Criminal Police Commission established in Vienna in 1923 (Deflem, 2000) and then, following World War II, in the shape of the International Criminal Police Office - or Interpol (Anderson, 1989). While this institution - which functions as a communications hub for participating national forces and as an international ‘police club’ - remains a player in the field of global policing, it has in recent decades been eclipsed, both by the prominent role taken by the USA in encouraging and facilitating cross-border police cooperation across the world (Nadelman, 1993) and by developments in the EU. The latter - as we shall see - has greatly expanded the scope for the formation and development of transnational police networks and working cultures (Sheptycki, 1998), whether in the guise of new modes of information-brokering and exchange; the control of particular zones (such as the frontier-free space created by the 1985 Schengen Agreement) and security ‘hotspots’ (e.g. the Channel Tunnel), or emergent cooperative arrangements between national forces and Europol liaison officers (Bigo, 2000a). Mention must also to be made here of the range of steps taken under the EU’s third pillar on ‘justice and home affairs’ to enhance cooperation between member-state police forces; of the thickening of relations between western European law enforcement agencies and their counterparts in the ‘post-communist’ east, and, lest we forget, of the emerging intersections between state police operatives and those employed by global commercial security concerns - in respect, for instance, of the detection and detention of illegal migrants (Johnston, 2000).

ii) New modes of inter-governmental cooperation. This represents perhaps the most prominent vehicle through which cross-border policing has been advanced in recent decades, especially within the EU. Commencing in 1957 with the formation of the Trevi group (set up initially to counter terrorism, a brief that was later extended to drugs, organized crime and police training and technology), this mode of transnational policing was given further impetus with the signing (by Germany, France and the Benelux countries) of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and a further Implementation Agreement in 1990. The latter encompassed a range of law enforcement measures designed to ‘compensate’ for the removal of frontier controls between signatory states, including cross-border rights of ‘hot-pursuit’ for national police forces and the establishment of the Schengen Information System. The agreement has now been signed by all 15 EU member-states except Britain and Ireland; Norway and Iceland have been granted associate status (den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 498).

Modes of inter-governmental cooperation on policing-related matters received their most significant boost, however, with the signing of the Treaties of Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997. The former introduced a new ‘third pillar’ of EU competence in the field of ‘justice and home affairs’, thereby extending the role of - Brussels-based - officials and the inter-governmental Council of Ministers over law enforcement matters.[2] The latter ushered in a new Treaty Chapter on the ‘area of freedom, security and justice’. This significantly strengthened specific EU competence over questions of visa, asylum, immigration and related matters pertaining to the free movement of persons by transferring them to the first pillar, while leaving police cooperation under the rubric of a truncated third pillar (in so doing, it incorporated the Schengen acquis into the new dual-pillar justice and home affairs structure - Walker, 2000a: 243-4).[3] Inter-governmentalism thus remains the principal vehicle by which cross-border police cooperation is effected, whether in respect of EU responses to forms of transnational crime, or in the increasingly prominent theatre of international police ‘peacekeeping’.[4]

iii)Emergent supranational institutions. There is however one agency - though presently governed largely through inter-governmental mechanisms under the third pillar - that has acquired not insignificant cross-border powers and spheres of influence, and which clearly exhibits the potential to develop into a novel supranational police body. I am referring to the European Police Office - or Europol. Envisioned and promoted by former German Chancellor Helmut Köhl - at a moment of ‘federalist’ self-confidence - as a kind of FBI for Europe, Europol was instituted by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. After a halting first few years in which it functioned as a Drugs Unit while member governments haggled over its remit and powers, the Europol Convention was finally implemented in 1998, allowing full operationalization to commence from 1 July 1999; a date Europol’s Director Jürgen Storbeck proclaimed - in the pages of the organization’s glossy 1999 report - as ‘significant for all citizens of the European Union’:

The vision of an integrated, European wide law enforcement action against international organized crime was a reality. For the first time ever, the European Union had a multi agency law enforcement organisation with the potential to support and co-ordinate law enforcement agencies’ actions to combat international organized crime.

(Europol Annual Report, 1999: 4)[5]

Europol’s field of formal legal competence now reaches beyond drugs to encompass illegal immigration, trafficking in human beings, stolen vehicle trafficking, money laundering, currency forgery (with especial reference to the Euro), terrorism and the smuggling of nuclear materials. Its principal mode of operation - or ‘core business’ - lies in the ‘exchange of information and intelligence’ (EDU/Europol Annual Report, 1997: 2), an activity coordinated through an EU-wide network of liaison officers (Bigo, 2000a). In undertaking this role, Europol maintains a database of ‘intelligence’ on transnational crime which it deploys to provide national forces with crime analysis and ‘technical expertise’. Following the landmark meeting of the EU Justice Council in Tampere, Finland in October 1999, moves are also afoot to enable the organization to establish joint investigative teams with member-state forces and to play ‘a key role in supporting union-wide crime prevention, analysis and investigation’ (Europol Annual Report, 1999: 5) - a role buttressed since 2000 by the advent of a European Public Prosecutors’ Office (or ‘Eurojust’). Europol is also in the process of establishing closer cooperative relations with national forces in eastern Europe - particularly in Russia and with states seeking accession to the EU.[6]

It is not my intention in this paper to offer a detailed discussion and evaluation of this complex, always-in-motion bricolage of networks, processes and institutions and its connections to the wider constitutional architecture of the EU.[7] Such accounts can be found in other places (Anderson et al., 1995; Walker, 2000a: ch. 8; 2000b; den Boer and Wallace, 2001). I also want to avoid proceeding in the descriptive mode that - as Peter Manning (2000: 177) has recently pointed out - all too often (although, it should be added, understandably) characterizes work on comparative and/or transnational criminal justice. Rather, my task is to attempt to theorize certain issues pertaining to the current trajectories and possible futures of ‘European policing’. I want, in particular, to formulate lines of argument around first, the concept of securitization and, second, that of democratization.[8] In respect of the former, my aim is to sketch a cultural sociology of policing and political identity in Europe. This entails consideration of the actors and meanings that are competing to shape the future course of European policing - the interests that are struggling over this terrain, the visions of policing that are coming to the fore or being rendered peripheral. In constructing a heuristic framework that enables better sociological sense to be made of the interplay between competing interests and meanings, I aim to situate the ‘bureaucracy beyond the state’ (Bigo 1994: 169) that currently prevails in determining the contours of European policing within a wider field of political and cultural possibility. In so doing, I offer an interpretative account of the elective affinity that exists between these governing interests and the tendency to articulate, and act upon, a diverse range of issues facing contemporary Europe under the sign of security - what we might term, following Waever (1996), the securitization of Europe (see also Bigo, 1994, 2000b; Huysmans, 2000).

In respect of the latter question, my concerns turn towards the political theory of postnational policing and focus on the problematics of authorization and legitimation that are raised by the onset of bureaucratically-dominated police processes and institutions at the European level. To what extent can it reasonably be said that European policing suffers from a series of ‘democratic deficits’? What form do such ‘deficits’ take and how are they best remedied? What mechanisms of regulation and governance are most fitted to the task of rendering European policing more democratically responsive and legitimate? In posing these questions, and seeking to clarify what might count as plausible answers to them, I offer a schematic outline some of the issues that must be addressed, and the criteria that might orientate us, in seeking to formulate and advance - in the policing domain - a project of postnational democracy (Curtin, 1997).

Cultures of post/national policing: mapping the securitization of Europe

Security policy is a specific policy of mediating belonging. Discourses of danger and security practices derive their political significance from their capacity to stimulate people to contract into a political community and to ground - or contest - political authority on the basis of reifying dangers.

(Huysmans, 2000: 757)

Policing, like all social institutions, is both ‘made and imagined’ (Unger, 1987). It operates within societies as an ensemble of practices and technologies oriented to instrumental purposes - the production of order and security. Yet it is at the same time a cultural and symbolic form - generating and communicating social meanings about such matters as order, authority, morality, normality and subjectivity. Policing, in other words, has to be understood as a category of thought and affect - a ‘condensing symbol’ (Turner, 1974) that enables individuals and groups to make sense of their past, form judgments on the present and project various possible futures. As an institution intimately concerned with the protection of the state and the security of its citizens, one that is entangled with some profound hopes, fears, fantasies and anxieties about matters such as protection/vulnerability, order/entropy and life/death, policing remains closely tied to people’s sense of ontological security and collective identity, and capable of generating high, emotionally-charged levels of identification among citizens. Through their presence, performance and voice, police institutions are able to evoke, affirm, reinforce, or (even) undermine many of the prevailing cultural characteristics of political communities, serving, in particular, as a vehicle through which ‘recognition’ within such communities is claimed, accorded or denied. Policing is, in short, closely bound up with how political order and identity are represented and ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1991).[9]

There is, however, no single historical or cross-cultural template from which these symbolic connections can be read off. To be sure, late-modern societies share a number of basic security dilemmas that policing is oriented towards and structured by. It is also true that the institutional mechanisms (democratic) states deploy to deliver and govern policing bear of number of family resemblances (Bayley, 1985); and that, under globalized conditions, particular policing styles - ‘zero-tolerance’, ‘problem-oriented policing’ etc. - resonate across territorial boundaries in ways that open up ‘local’ practices to increased scrutiny. But none of this provides grounds for claiming that the social meanings of policing - the precise ways in which it functions as a cultural category - are homogenous or invariant across time and space. Rather, it seems safer to suppose that such meanings have national genealogies that vary according to how processes of state and police formation have unfolded historically; and take contemporary forms that are conditioned by, and in turn condition, the particular political cultures of which they form part. There is, indeed, plenty of comparative historical and sociological evidence to support just these suppositions (e.g. Walden, 1983; Sheptycki, 1999; Ellison and Smyth, 2000; Emsley, 2000).

How though do these reflections help us make sense of the connections between policing and collective identity that are - or might be - operative at the transnational level? What cultures of policing are competing, not merely for ascendancy within the field of European policing, but for the right to constitute and name the very field itself?[10]What social meanings of policing are - to adapt Raymond Williams’s schema - emergent or assuming dominance within Europe? Which are being rendered residual, or oppositional(Williams, 1977: ch. 8; 1981: 203-5)? How, in short, might a theoretical perspective that treats policing as a symbolic form help us to better understand certain key aspects of postnational policing and its contemporary formation?

A cultural sociology of the properties and potential trajectories of the field of European policing requires us to map (and explain relations between) the competing subnational, national and transnational agents/agencies that are - or might be - efficacious in shaping that field, and the discourses that such actors consciously or implicitly bring forth or rely upon. A threefold distinction between professional, governmental and layforces and discourses is, I believe, useful here. These three containers of meaning and meaning-formation are of course internally differentiated, institutionally and discursively overlapping, and unevenly articulated at subnational, national and transnational levels. The orientations to post/national policing to be located within each ‘container’, and the lines of divergence, convergence and hybridization that obtain between them, clearly require filling-out and refining in the light of grounded empirical enquiry. The following analytic and substantive considerations may nonetheless assist us in mapping the current trajectories of European policing, the values and visions that animate the field, and the alternative political possibilities that remain immanent within it:

i) Let us start with professional practices and cultures. Two sets of issues are brought into initial focus here. The first concerns the assemblage of institutional mechanisms that are deployed within Europe to deliver and govern policing. There are some grounds for suggesting that these both vary across national boundaries and are deeply rooted in the soil of specific political cultures. Divergences between centralized (e.g. Sweden) and decentralized (e.g. Belgium) police systems springs to mind here, as does the contrast between ‘military’ (Gendarmerie, Carabinieri) and ‘civilian’ police traditions (cf. Emsley, 1996; 2000). These distinctions are clearly important and remain capable of structuring police institution- or capacity-building at the European level. But the sharpness and import of these institutional models may also be atrophying in the face of international policing developments. Practices of cross-national ‘law enforcement shopping’ are - as den Boer (1999) has recently noted - eroding the differences between national policing styles. She also argues that ‘Europeanization’ is serving to strengthen central steering mechanisms in countries that hitherto possessed diverse, multi-tiered police systems, such as Belgium and the Netherlands. The post-cold war involvement of national security agencies in ‘internal’ policing matters may be having a similar harmonizing effect.

Cognate considerations and uncertainties hold in respect of the working cultures of police organizations. The sociology of police work has amply documented the coexistence among law enforcement agents of parochialism and defensiveness (evident in tensions between ranks, functional specialisms and subnational/national police units) and a transforce, even transnational solidarity between officers founded on the shared structural peculiarities of the job (as witnessed in several international police associations). These conflicting tendencies stand at the European level in uneasy relation to one another. They may result, on the one hand, in modes of cross-border police cooperation in Europe being hindered, not merely by such matters as language difficulties, a lack of common working procedures and the absence of an European criminal law (Anderson et al., 1995: ch. 6), but also by the locally-bounded cultural practices and ‘Euro-police sceptical’ outlooks of law enforcement agents. Such resistance is likely to be especially marked among those national policing agents/agencies who feel they are being displaced by developments at the European level (Bigo, 2000a). Yet these very institutional developments may also be giving rise to new (hybrid) working practices and dispositions among officers moved by the common threat of the transnational criminal Other and possessing - as Bourdieu would say - a shared ‘feel for the game’.[11] As Didier Bigo (2000a) has recently argued, Europol liaison officers are beginning to play a pivotal role here in forging the development of what he calls a ‘European police mentality’. The more general thickening of police networks that is taken place under the rubric of the third pillar seems set to have similar effects (Walker, 2000b: 92).[12]

Indeed, the third pillar framework now provides a vehicle through which horizontal cooperation between European police forces can be further developed, and just such a professional ideology forged. In recent years, a host of measures targeted precisely at these ends have been initiated, including the formation of an Operational Task Group of European Chief Police Officers, the advent of a European Police College, and an array of dedicated justice and home affairs programmes concerned with improving police language skills, up-grading equipment, and generally transferring expertise. To this one must add the specific effects of the EU ‘enlargement’ programme; a programme that has been couched by Europe’s political elite very much in security terms, and which is witnessing (through mechanisms such as ‘twinning’ arrangements) the creation of closer working relations between EU member-state police forces and their counterparts in countries seeking accession. None of this should occasion much surprise. Unlike other domains of EU competence (such as the social chapter, or farming and fisheries) where its role is to act-at-a-distance to regulate market exchange, part of the raison d’etre of the third pillar is to effect coordination between the public police institutions of Europe. Nor should we stand aghast at the manner is which this is currently being accomplished. In the absence of the competence (or legitimacy) that would enable European policing to proceed through explicit acts of capacity- or institution-building, closer police cooperation is largely being achieved incrementally through such aforementioned acts of ‘soft law’ (den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 511). There now exists, nonetheless, a powerful institutional motor driving the formation of both stronger ties between Europe’s police forces, and a transnational police elite oriented to forging common ‘solutions’ to common ‘security’ problems. This elite has, in turn, come to form part of an opaque, thinly accountable policy network increasingly organized around an ideology of European security.

ii) It is with this in mind that we must approach the question of governmental institutions and discourses. Here an initial distinction needs to be made between elected political classes and permanent governing officials. With regard to the former a number of competing forces are in play. On the one hand, national politicians represent political cultures whose values and practices - with respect to matters such as citizenship (Brubaker, 1992) or police governance (Loveday, 1999) - condition their willingness or ability to coordinate security responses at a European level. They may also find themselves constrained by - or, conversely, acting as spokespersons for - national cultural sentiment that stands opposed to further integration and, in the field of policing/law enforcement especially, can be reluctant to cede control over what remains a powerful icon of legal and political sovereignty (Walker, 2000b). Yet at the same time, various forces and imperatives (media campaigns, electoral competition, the perceived scale of the threat) drive political classes to act - or be seen to be acting - against matters such as illegal immigration, or money laundering, or terrorism. For politicians practically aware of the limited capacity of ‘sovereign’ states to act alone against these ‘threats’, and deeply schooled in the symbolic politics that surrounds many relevant issues, the possibility of launching crime control projects at new sites - ‘unsullied by association with past failures and disappointments at the national level’ (Walker, 2000b: 92) - may thus have a strong allure. All in all, this works to produce some powerful political motivations for developing a European policing capacity in inter-governmental forms - forms that enable police cooperation to unfold without either a loss of national sovereignty, or close, effective forms of democratic supervision.

These various imperatives press more weakly - or, at least, more unevenly - on governmental officials tasked with the administration of law enforcement. This has the effect - as we shall see - of enabling relevant issues to be framed - away from the heat of European constitutional politics - in (technocratic) ways that are perceived to fit the ‘objective’ requirements of the European polity (albeit that the competing claims of inter-governmentalism and supranationalism continue to be pressed in these settings - Shore, 2000: 173). Of pivotal significance here is the particular mode of governance that has come the characterize policy- and polity-making in the EU, one dominated by ‘middle-range officials of the Community and Member-states in combination with a variety of private and semi-public bodies’ (Weiler, 1999: 98). Known widely among analysts of the EU by the ugly neologism ‘comitology’ (Schmitter, 1996: 133; Joerges and Vos, 1999), this governing ethos has become especially prominent in the field of justice and home affairs. In part, this has to do with the labyrinthine committee structure established to transact inter-governmental cooperation in this policy domain - arrangements in which officials from both member-state justice/interior ministries and the EU occupy a prominent, semi-permanent position. To this one must add the effects of the ‘incompletely theorized’ agreements (Walker, 2000b: 96) that tend to characterize international treaty-making, agreements that have in the justice field resulted in much important, contentious detail (in respect, say, of Europol’s remit, or visa and asylum policy) being shifted to, and shaped by, the closed, self-corroborating ‘comitological’ structure. These factors have combined to generate a field of European policing dominated and shaped by a particular, thinly accountable complex of powerful interests - what Bigo (1994: 169) terms ‘a bureaucracy beyond the state’. In police cooperation as elsewhere, the EU appears to have given rise to an ‘ever closer union’ of governmental elites (Shore, 2000: 232).

Joseph Weiler - along with a number of other academic commentators on European integration (e.g. Shore, 2000: 144, 220) - has recently emphasised the managerialist dispositions of such elites, highlighting their ‘belief that a rational management and regulatory solutions can be found by an employment of technocratic expertise’ (Weiler, 1999: 284). This contention chimes closely with that of analysts who see ‘functional spill-over’ as the major propellant of European cooperation in matters of justice and home affairs - wherein law enforcement measures are deemed necessary to fill ‘gaps’ created by wider integrative processes such as the lifting of border controls (Walker, 1998).[13] There are grounds for thinking, however, that this functionalist (and essentially technocratic) policy discourse has of late come to be permeated by a more substantive (and much more overtly political) disposition oriented to conceiving of Europe a single ‘internal security field’ (Bigo, 1994), and thus to making good its ‘security deficits’. We might term this process - following Ole Waever (1996) - the securitization of Europe. It is one that entails ‘framing’ selected social problems (such as migration - Huysmans, 2000) in ways that dramatize the threat they pose to Europe’s citizens; one that couches the ‘problem’ at hand as one of imperatives not choices, such that new - ‘tough’, exclusionary, criminal-justice-centred - responses are made to seem both urgent and inevitable; one that is, as such, something other than the mere exercise of technocratic statecraft. By ‘organizing social relations into security relations’ (Huysmans, 1998: 232), securitization projects a very specific vision of European political order and identity.

So are the postnational policing developments set out in this paper to be read as a sign that Europe’s ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations are now being structured by processes of securitization (Bigo, 2000b)? Is Europe today being governed through security (cf. Simon, 1997)?[14] Such questions can be addressed along either of two dimensions, and in respect of each they are most plausibly answered both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In terms of the relative prominence of security discourse, a negative response is called for in so far as the preponderance of policy activity within the EU is neither concerned first and foremost with security issues, nor articulated under a security banner. Governance within the European polity remains primarily oriented towards the operation of the single market and Euro, and with a mix of associated regulatory matters in fields such as competition, conditions of employment and consumer rights. The discourse (and visions) of its political leaders continue to cohere in the main around the goals of economic prosperity and social cohesion (e.g. Prodi, 2001). Yet, at the same time, it seems increasingly clear that, in the face of illegal migration, the international drugs trade, political violence, armed ethnic conflict in the Balkans and cognate threats that circulate around a globalized world, security discourses are coming ever more to the forefront of European politics. It is, in this regard, of some (at least symbolic) import that two out of the three pillars of EU competence are explicitly concerned with - ‘external’ and ‘internal’ - security. It is similarly worth highlighting the degree to which the enlargement process is being nervously articulated in security terms - the incorporation of former Warsaw Pact states being seen as both vital to European security and as a potential threat to it. And we need to take note of the surge in policy activity that has taken place of late under the justice and home affairs rubric (an intensity fuelled in part by the enlargement question); a telling indicator of which is the decision of justice ministers following the 1999 Tampere summit to embark on a work programme equivalent in scale to that which preceded the ‘1992’ single market programme (den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 517).[15] Security (and by extension policing) has, one might argue, become central at the margins - increasingly mobilized to protect ‘Europe’ from an array of external threats, increasingly implicated in constituting the meanings of both these ‘threats’ and the political community they are said to endanger.

In terms of the substance of policy, the above questions also invite both affirmative and negative responses. On the one hand, justice and home affairs policy is not merely gaining momentum, but doing so in a manner shot through with considerations of security. In part this can be seen in the event-led, ‘disjointed incrementalism’ that characterizes EU policy-making in this field (den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 514); something that seems a far cry from the formation at the European level of any kind of holistic policing or criminal justice ‘system’. But it stands out most clearly in the agenda currently being advanced in relation to the treaty chapter on the ‘area of ‘freedom, security and justice’; one that is much concerned with widening and deepening police cooperation, harmonizing criminal procedures, restricting asylum and other forms of migration, and combating organized crime; much less so with questions of due process, suspects’ rights and democratic accountability. There is little doubt that, in these respects, ‘security’ triumphed at Tampere (Statewatch, 1999a). Yet we must be careful not to read current developments too one-dimensionally. The EU has in also recent years taken a robust line against racial discrimination, not least in the establishment of a European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (Monar, 2000). To this we might add the emergence - post-Maastricht - of ‘European citizenship’ as a field of policy activity; something that was given a significant boost at the Tampere summit with the establishment of a panel to draft a Fundamental Convention of Human Rights covering EU institutions (de Búrca, 2001). And note ought to taken of the calls made recently by both French and German governments for Europol to be made more accountable to the European Parliament, and for its actions to be justiciable at the European Court of Justice (Jospin, 2001; Schröder, 2001). While some forceful ‘securitizing moves’ are clearly being made within Europe (Buzan et al., 1998: 25), security is by no means the only discourse that might potentially shape the future contours of European policing.

iii)Finally, in this section, let us consider lay mentalities and sensibilities. By this I am referring to the structures of thought and feeling towards policing that circulate within particular European states - structures, I suggested earlier, whose substance and effects vary across different nation-states. This variance depends in part on the wider traditions of statism and state-scepticism (and relations of authority more generally) that obtain across Europe (Dyson, 1980; Siedentop, 2000: ch. 6); and on popular sentiment towards the appropriate role of citizens, markets and government in provision of primary social goods. These, in turn, intersect closely with more specific considerations pertaining to policing, such as the place police institutions occupy in national histories, mythologies and consciousness; their involvement in forms of social and political conflict; and the narrative representations of policing that circulate in the media, whether as news or fictional drama. Taken together, these are likely to give rise to differing levels of identification with - or distance from - the police, and to specific cultural constructions of the relationship between policing and the social. Further differences are, moreover, likely to surface withinnation-stateboundaries, structured by such operative axes of social division and inequality as class, gender, ethnicity, age and region.

These lay sensibilities towards policing stand at present - in the relative absence of the kind of transnational public sphere within which a European consciousness towards relevant issues might take root (Schlesinger and Kevin, 2000) - as the most territorially fixed component of the European policing field. This is not to say, however, that they remain analytically or politically insignificant. Attention towards them enables us, for instance, to examine which national police forms are being enacted in - or residualized by - new modes of European police delivery and governance. In so far as European policing unfolds against the backdrop of ‘the cultural sub-strate of civil solidarity that developed in the context of the nation-state’ (Habermas, 2001: 71), one requiring police institutions to be grounded in some kind of public consent, one has also to examine the forms of sub-national and national sentiment that are mobilized by political elites seeking to legitimate police cooperation beyond the state. This enables us further to identify the cultural sensibilities that have come to assume oppositional status in the light of institutional development at the European level and which thereby offer resources for an alternative politics. This seems most likely at present to take the form of movements who feel their cultural identity threatened by ‘Europe’ and which seek to resist further (policing) integration - what Waever (1996) nicely terms ‘nations calling states home’. But it may also, conversely, take shape as an avowedly international human rights discourse that is sharply critical of the current trajectory of European policing and security - whether in the guise of non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty, Statewatch and Helsinki Human Rights Watch, or of social movements whose opposition to neo-liberal globalization brings them into new forms of conflict with European law enforcement agencies.

In these respects the relationship that unfolds between European elites pursuing closer police (and justice) cooperation and different strands of European ‘public opinion’ remains a partially open and intriguing question. At least three possibilities appear to lie before us. The first - and arguably most likely - is that the field of European policing will develop in ways that continue to disregard societal processes of public will-formation - whether at member-state or supranational levels. We are faced, in other words, with the prospect that security agendas will buttress and deepen the EU’s already opaque, bureaucratic processes by de-politicizing those issues - migration, drugs trafficking, ethnic conflict and the like - that come to be coded, and responded to, in such terms (Buzan et al., 1998: 23-6; Bigo, 2000b). As Waever (1996: 106) notes, security is a social practice. It is, as such, a way of acting that selectively problematizes and makes visible social issues so as to efface the differences between them; one that lifts such issues above the realm of normal politics, severs their connections to questions of social justice, and subsumes them within a discourse of ‘effectiveness’ that evinces a strong tendency to trump considerations of civil liberty. Though there are signs that Europe’s political elites are coming to view this way of determining the path of further integration as untenable, it is a course of action - not least in the field of justice and home affairs - that has some powerful governmental forces working to sustain it.

A second not unconnected possibility is that security rhetorics are increasingly mobilized as a vehicle for manufacturing a European public opinion from the ‘top down’. We are confronted here - in the absence of common symbols around which postnational affiliation might more positively cohere - with the prospect of a European political identity coalescing negatively around the threats to safety and wellbeing posed to Europe’s citizens by an array of dangerous Others (Bigo, 2000a: 93). At a time when it is proving difficult for EU elites to legitimate the European polity among the continent’s citizens, such mobilization can have a powerful allure; and there is some suggestion, in the wake of Tampere, that European political leaders have consciously decided to use the domain of justice and home affairs as a vehicle for demonstrating the EU’s ‘relevance’ to citizens, and building public support. As Cris Shore (2000: 63) has observed: ‘the easiest way to promote a sense of European identity is to manipulate fears of Europe being invaded by enemy aliens’ (cf. Huysmans, 1998: 238; 2000).

Both these emergent trajectories have, it seems to me, an array of dangers associated with them - the bulk of which flow from the self-reinforcing, potentially limitless quality that characterizes security discourse. Security - as a number of commentators have noted - is always more ‘within us a yearning than without us a fact’ (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 99; cf. Zedner, 2000); something that gives the pursuit of security - qua security - a powerful tendency not merely to disappoint and disenchant, but also to colonize more and more domains of public policy discourse.[16] Yet, in the face of all this, alternative futures do remain open to us - futures in which European security discourses come to be more effectively constrainedwithin a framework of democratic citizenship. Such a prospect remains immanent to the extent that the EU has recently begun to articulate a language of European citizenship and taken limited steps down the road of granting civil, social and political rights to EU citizens (Meehan, 1993). This, in turn, has promoted movements within a still nascent European civil society to begin to mobilize against the securitization of Europe in the name of deepening EU democracy and extending postnational citizenship (Curtin, 1997: 57). There are, of course, a host of sociological questions that need to be asked about how the relationship between security and citizenship comes to be articulated within the European demos in coming years - questions that I have begun in the preceding few pages to probe. But such questions can also be recast in normative terms and pressed as an enquiry into whether European policing might offer an effective conduit for democratic politics. It is to this issue that the remainder of the paper is devoted.

Questions of postnational democracy: the future governance of European policing

Social theory has of late been much concerned with the ways in which economic and social power is today being loosened from its territorial moorings and becoming free from effective national steering or control (e.g. Strange, 1996; Castells, 1997: ch. 5; Bauman, 1999). Power, it is suggested, has under the globalizing conditions of the present escaped from politics, shaken-off the constraints of politically-constituted governments, been rendered fugitive. Though originally formed to counter the security risks of a different age, the European Union has in this altered context come to be represented (sometimes by these very same theorists) as a potential solution to this predicament; this polity-in-the-making being viewed both as a defensive reaction to neo-liberal globalization (Castells, 1998: 318-25), and as an institutional vehicle that might yet enable - as Habermas (2001: 54) puts it - politics to ‘catch up’ with markets.

There is much in this assessment, at least at the level of promise and potentiality. Yet it is also arguably the case that the EU has been assembled in ways that simply recast the terms of the original problem, creating new sites and instantiations of power beyond the state that are at best dimly responsive to Europe’s citizens. This has become known - among both EU ‘insiders’ and academic commentators alike - as the ‘democratic deficit’ (Beetham and Lord, 1998: 26-9; Weiler, 1999: ch. 8). There are, to be sure, theorists who have sought to qualify, or draw the sting from, this frequently levelled critique of EU politics. MacCormick (1999: 142-5), for instance, has powerfully defended the mix of governing styles and modes of representation that compose European constitutionalism. Others have seen in the EU’s ‘comitological’ structure the seeds of a deliberative supranational governance (Eriksen, 2000). Eric Hobsbawm (1997: 268), adopting a different tack, contends that the EU has from the outset been designedly undemocratic, and is no less - perhaps more - successful because of it. But these voices stand alongside a large body of opinion that has grown deeply concerned with the opaque, self-corroborating modes of rule one encounters in the EU, a system - described by Curtin (1997: 45) as ‘a massive circus of committees operating behind closed doors and in virtual secrecy’ - that exhibits some profound shortcomings as regards its democratic credentials (Weiler, 1999: ch. 8). It is stretching the point, but not stretching it too far, to say that the EU represents a form of ‘governance without government’ (cf. Hardt and Negri, 2000: 13-17).

The field of European policing both reflects this wider pattern of institutional development, while at the same time making its own specific contribution to the overall configuration. We have already noted that under the third pillar - an arena of EU competence where ‘the empowerment of the executive and of civil servants has been institutionalised particularly strongly’ (Curtin, 1997: 46) - arrangements for governing European police cooperation take the form of policy networks operating at some remove from direct democratic input or oversight. We are able, in addition, to highlight the secrecy and restricted information flows that attend policy-formation in the justice and home affairs field (Statewatch, 1999b), as well as taking cognisance of the marginal role the European Parliament plays in this domain (den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 509). And we might emphasise the importance these ‘deficits’ assume in respect of an institutional complex possessing the means - if not a monopoly - of legitimate violence and surveillance; one that can impact significantly for better and worse on the quality of life of Europe’s peoples - EU citizens and non-citizens alike. The means by which this public power and social good is allocated and made responsive to different ‘publics’ are clearly of some import.[17]

How then might we best respond to this situation? Is it possible to develop a policing capacity in Europe that is both effective and protective of democratic values and liberties? How might modes of European police cooperation be made more responsive to the public constituencies whose lives are affected by it? Can considerations of equity and justice be sustained in the face of Europe’s current securitizing tendencies? Plainly, these questions lie beyond the ambit of this paper and I shall neither attempt to address them in anything approaching a definitive manner, nor engage in the kind of institutional design they ultimately require. My more modest aim is to accomplish two things. First, to clear a little ground by mounting a critique of two currently prevalent - and superficially appealing - responses to the EU’s democratic deficits, responses which appear to tackle the problems of legitimation raised by the advent of postnational policing, but which both turn out to be cul-de-sacs. Second, and in a more reconstructive vein, to examine some of the issues that must be addressed, and the criteria that might orientate us, in seeking to formulate - in the particular domain of policing - a project of postnational democracy.

The first of these ‘dead-ends’ is associated with the tendency - one that looms implicitly in much European security discourse - to collapse democratic legitimacy into social legitimacy (cf. Anderson et al., 1995: 267). In what might be described as a Weberian hangover (Beetham, 1991: ch. 1), this latter term reduces legitimacy to the question of whether forms of cross-border police cooperation are found to be ‘acceptable’ to Europe’s citizens. Clearly there are aspects of legitimacy that are properly addressed by such a conception. But it remains, ultimately, a discourse of effectiveness, with citizen acceptance flowing from the perceived performance of European police institutions in countering a range of criminal ‘threats’. Thus understood, ‘legitimacy’ all-too-easily becomes self-confirming (ibid.,: 99) - amounting to not much more than law enforcement agencies responding to popular anxieties that are in part the consequence of in/securitization projects championed by political elites, the media or police institutions themselves. This likelihood seems especially pronounced in relation to transnational crime, a terrain of ‘threats’ that remains experentially remote from the daily lives of most EU citizens, and where issues are often framed in accordance with the logics of a highly mediated, symbolic politics.[20] When one couples this with the paucity of institutional mechanisms through which public authorization can be actively elicited or withdrawn, mechanisms that fall some distance short of meeting the stipulations of any coherent framework for the legitimation of power (see Beetham, 1991: ch. 2; and also, Beetham and Lord, 1998), one begins to see social ‘legitimacy’ as sufficiently partial and reductive as to not properly warrant the nomenclature at all. The passive indifference of the many, and the impassioned - not infrequently xenophobic - demands of the (noisy, or powerful) few, cannot reasonably ground the democratic legitimacy of postnational policing forms. One needs to beware, secondly, of what Neil Walker (2000a: 256-8) has termed the national sovereignty trap. Walker uses this term to characterize the discourse of actors who respond to the movement of legal and political power from states to the EU (and the democratic shortfalls that have accompanied this process) by striving either to claw these powers back for the nation-state, or to allow national parliaments to exercise more leverage over what is now performed at the European level. Given the fact that our received democratic lexicon - of membership, representation, participation, accountability and so forth - is saturated with presumptions concerning the sovereign primacy of states, this should hardly surprise (Schmitter, 1996: 132; Eriksen and Fossum, 2000: 7). But it is a trap nonetheless. At best, it fails to register the shifts in policing capacity that have already taken place, shifts that have significantly empowered policy networks above the level of the nation-state - it is, to this extent, a discourse that seeks to strengthen the door of a stable that the horses have long since vacated! Often, however, most obviously in the British case, this discourse functions as the barely concealed code of political and social movements that aim to undo the whole European integrationist project - in justice and home affairs as elsewhere. Addressing the democratic deficit in the place at which it arises - by strengthening European political institutions, or establishing more robust connections between national and supranational modes of governance - would strike such movements as abhorrent. Either way, this is a discourse that stands in the path of developing democratic forms properly fitted to the unique political architecture of the European Union.

By way of a contribution to the furtherance of this political project, I want - in a more positive spirit - to initiate two lines of analysis. This first - which takes up and develops a point made persuasively by a number of writers on European democracy (e.g. Bellamy and Castiglone, 2000) - emphasises the importance of attending closely to the specific institutional, political and social dynamics of the field of European policing, and of the wider polity of which it forms part. Several considerations arise here. Such specificity demands, first and foremost, that we think about designing regulatory arrangements that have some affinity with the EU’s functionally variable structure of multi-level governance - the cap must, in other words, fit. This requires, in turn, not merely ‘stretching’ concepts that have been tied historically to ‘the territorial logic of the state’ (Eriksen and Fossum, 2000: 7), nor the grafting of national institutional forms onto the political body of the EU. Rather, it necessitates some innovative thinking about the precise complex of subnational, national and supranational mechanisms best suited to the task of rendering European policing more democratically responsive - not only in respect of bounded institutions such as Europol, but also when it comes to bringing under closer supervision the networks of third pillar officials and police elites that currently elude the democratic gaze.

One must recognize, secondly, that European policing is an almost entirely informationalized activity - a practice oriented not to the on-the-ground delivery of visible police functions such as arrest, patrol or crowd-control, but towards supporting such practices through the generation, storage and dissemination of information. Some policing commentators have been inclined to conclude from this - or, more particularly, from the barriers that currently impede the efficient transaction of cross-border information-brokering - that European policing is somehow peripheral, non-operational, even largely mythical. This, in my view, is a mistake, one that fails to notice the cognate trends occurring within both national police forces in particular (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997) and contemporary surveillance practices more generally (Lyon 2001); and underestimates the import of the activities that are actually taking place on a specifically European level. For present purposes, the pertinent point about such activities is that they accord European policing a low public visibility, something a postnational regulatory politics needs to take full account of.

Thirdly, and relatedly, cross-border police cooperation remains experentially distant from the everyday lives and outlooks of most European citizens - a practice such citizens have little unmediatedsense of. While this of course holds in large measure in respect of police practices within European states, intra-national policing retains both a visible presence in local social relations and an orientation to dangers about which citizens often possess some personal experience or situated/local knowledge. None of this really holds at the transnational level. Here law enforcement agents operate mostly ‘behind-the-scenes’ in response to ‘threats’ that are either i) obscure to lay understanding by virtue of the secrecy and technical expertise that surround them (e.g. money laundering, counterfeiting Euro’s); or ii) apparent but rather ‘placeless’, operating at-a-distance from the lived relations of particular European localities (e.g. illegal migration, the cross-border trafficking of people, drugs or stolen goods). This, coupled with a regime of media reporting that combines routine inattention to developments in European criminal justice (den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 501), with an often zealous, securitizing focus on the ‘dangers’ posed by asylum-seeking or transnational crime, also serves to give this field of regulatory politics its particular social form.

Fourthly, one needs to address the fact that European policing is markedby adeep asymmetry in the social distribution of its benefits and burdens. Such asymmetries of course also obtain within national settings - policing burdens being commonly experienced by the most economically and socially disadvantaged individuals and social groups. Yet there are processes in play at this level (traffic regulation, the enforcement of soft drug laws, and so on) which mean that policing remains for ‘law-abiding’ citizens a potentially double-edged sword, one whose burdens might periodically fall upon them (or those close to them) in ways that can make the control of police conduct an experentially pressing concern. In the field of European policing, however, these benefits and burdens have been almost entirely de-coupled - the policing of transnational crime being an activity directed largely at Others (migrants, organized criminals, drugs-traffickers etc.) on behalf of us (Europe’s citizens). These various categories of Other are, moreover, both routinely represented as alien, marginal and dangerous, and generally lacking in cultural or political capital.

These considerations matter for a number of reasons. On the one hand, they help explain the relative absence across Europe of public demands for more democratically responsive forms of postnational policing, and the ease with which European political and police elites can secure ‘legitimacy’ by dramatizing selected threats and indicating what is being - or ‘must’ be - done to repress them. Yet they also warn us of the risks that attend strategies of democratization in this field, risks that inhere in creating institutional spaces that cement processes of securitization by enabling voice to be given to the untutored prejudices and anxieties of European citizens vis-à-vis the threat posed by ‘alien’ or ‘criminal’ Others. It is to head-off this possibility, and further the chances of European policing unfolding in a manner capable of countering tendencies towards securitization, that my second strand of analysis is directed.

Building on recent work on the governance of plural policing in national contexts (Loader, 2000), I want to suggest that we conceptualize the problem of democracy in European policing around a principle of public justice. In that earlier intervention, I set out the component elements of such a principle (a politics of recognition, of human rights, and of allocation) and indicated how they might serve to regulate plural policing networks in ways consistent with considerations of democratic deliberation, effectiveness and equity. My task here is to demonstrate the potential value of the three constitutive moments of public justice to the task of democratizing cross-border police institutions and processes, and to consider how they might be adapted to the specificities of the European policing field. Using a slight reformulation borrowed from Ulrich Preuss (1998: 148), let us briefly take each in turn:

Recognition. The politics of recognition demands that policing policy is determined by processes of public will-formation that elicit and take account of the views of all individuals and groups likely to be affected by relevant decisions. In the European field, such a politics points in the direction of creating new deliberative spaces that enable a diverse range of police audiences to contest the institutional forms and practical strategies that compose postnational policing. Opening up the ‘comitology’ process to a wide range of non-governmental organizations (including those representing non-EU citizens such as asylum-seekers, or recipients of police interventions beyond the EU’s borders) presents one obvious possibility here (Eriksen, 2000). So too does the involvement on non-state actors (such as the Civil Society Forum - Curtin, 1997: 57) in justice and home affairs summits, and the development of the European Parliament’s role in delivering more robust forms of deliberative oversight for cross-border policing.

Rights. Concerns with questions of recognition and representation tend - quite properly - to privilege substantive outcomes that can secure the broadest levels of citizen agreement. This plainly, however, harbours certain majoritarian dangers, and to this extent needs supplementing by a politics of rights that delimits the outcomes of policy-formation processes to those that demonstrably avoid either i) prejudicing the active rights of any individual or social group affected by the decision; or ii) being disproportionately detrimental to the other legitimate interests and aspirations of such individuals and groups. In terms of European policing, such a politics requires at least the full application of the EU’s Convention of Fundamental Rights to matters of police cooperation, and, relatedly, the making of Europol’s activities justiciable before the European Court of Justice. Rights-based considerations may also have a particular purchase in areas of cross-border policing (such as actions against money laundering) which are technically specialist and remote from citizens; areas where matters of due process constitute perhaps the main democratic imperative. The cultivation within the European policing complex of a human rights culture also stands as an important political priority here, not least in seeking to counter-balance dominant security agendas.

Resources. The politics of resources (or what I once - with less alliterative flair - termed allocation) is concerned with trying to ensure that all citizens are provided with a ‘fair’ share of available policing goods; something that requires attention both to the unwarranted ‘over’ (or overly invasive) policing of particular individuals or social groups, and to the inability of (disadvantaged) citizens and communities to acquire a proportionate level of such goods (cf. Johnston, 1999: ch. 10). At a European level, this has two plausible levels of application. It directs attention, first of all, to the balance that is to be struck between the funds taken up by the field of justice and home affairs, and those available for other social goods delivered by the EU, something that impinges directly on the question of securitization. Within the justice and home affairs domain itself, it signals, secondly, the importance of establishing forms of democratic input into, and oversight of, the processes that determine how governmental resources are distributed, most obviously in respect of the formulation of Europol’s annual priorities. The European Parliament could, in both these respects, fruitfully be accorded a more proactive role in this field.

I have been able here to offer no more than a preliminary sketch of the ways in which a concept of public justice might enable the European policing field to be structured in a manner that is democratically more responsive and capable of providing an effective counter-balance to dominant securitizing tendencies. The prospects of the field moving in such a direction remain however, for reasons I have touched upon, somewhat remote. There is among Europe’s citizens relatively little awareness of, let alone active concern about, emergent modes of cross-border policing. In the light of this, and in the absence of effective channels of democratic supervision, Europe’s political and justice elites have little trouble in either ‘going-on’ in this field without much regard to ‘public opinion’ or, more proactively, in mobilizing public ‘fears’ about ‘alien’ or ‘criminal’ Others as a device for securing public support, or resources, or both. Herein, perhaps, are to be found the greatest - and most disquieting - temptations of securitizing projects and discourses; temptations that might yet all-too-easily result in a European cultural identity being constructed negatively, in defensive opposition to an apprehended array of ‘existential threats’ to ‘Europe’ and its security (Buzan et al., 1998: 27; Waever, 1996).

Yet while this must stand as the dominant strand of this tale, it remains - as I have indicated - only part of the story. The EU and its democratic shortcomings have, for instance, in the aftermath of Maastricht, assumed a greater prominence in the consciousness of Europe’s citizens - something with unsettling and uncertain implications for the EU’s future development (Weiler, 1999: 4). This ‘polity-in-constant-motion’ also arguably exhibits a constitutional plasticity far greater than that of any of its member-states; something that makes the question of capacity- and institution-building both unusually prominent and more than usually ‘up-for-grabs’. And since 1992, the EU has begun to articulate a discourse of postnational citizenship in ways that open up a space for immanent critique and an alternative democratic politics; a space around which a genuinely European civil society - and public sphere - is perhaps slowly starting to form. The further development of this political space - and with it the possibility of deepening forms of civicidentification with common European institutions - invites us, it seems to me, to seek to infuse EU politics with a spirit of ‘democratic experimentalism’ (Unger, 1998: 5-29). Such a project must, of course, proceed incrementally, with realistic goals, in pursuit of small gains. But it must do so in the expectation that a different, more democratic Europe remains capable of being built. It is in this - Ungerian - spirit that these reflections on the future governance of European policing are proffered.

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence; the Trento Doctoral Programme on Organized Crime, University of Bologna; the ESRC ‘Future Governance’ programme seminar on ‘How does crime policy travel?, Department of Criminology, Keele University; and the 2001 joint meetings of the Law and Society Association/Research Committee on the Sociology of Law (ISA), Central European University, Budapest. I would like to thank all those who participated in the discussions that ensued, as well as Monica den Boer, James Sheptycki and Neil Walker for their comments on the earlier text. The usual disclaimer applies.

These threats in fact represent but one of the motors driving the development of European policing and cannot be said to have determined the form of response that has emerged over the last four decades (Anderson et al., 1995: ch. 1). Indeed, one of the claims I want to develop in this paper is that the ‘naming’ of these events is part of what is at issue in conditioning the kind of transnational policing capacity that takes shape in Europe over the coming period.

The third pillar is administered by an elaborate institutional structure that encompasses, not only the Council of national justice and interior ministers and the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), but also the Article 36 Committee (named, since 1997, after the authorising section of the Amsterdam Treaty) comprising permanent representatives from the justice and interior ministries of member-states. This committee in turn has a (current) total of ten working parties, four of which deal directly with police matters (Walker, 2000a: 236; den Boer and Wallace, 2001: 514-15).

The designation ‘third’ pillar signifies the addition of a new field of EU competence to that of the first pillar dealing with economic integration and a second pillar concerned with common foreign and security policy. By transferring visa, asylum etc. to the first pillar, the Treaty of Amsterdam has rendered these policy domains subject to European Commission initiative and qualified majority-voting in the EU Council of Ministers, thereby reducing the power of individual member-states.

Of particular prominence here are the involvements of EU member-state police agents in dealing with the aftermath of war in the former Yugoslavia, whether in the form of ‘peacekeeping’ patrols, or in trying to stem migration flows into Europe through the so-called ‘Balkan corridor’. Against the backdrop of the fading distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ security (Anderson et al., 1995: ch. 5; Bigo, 2000b) one should also mention the onset of the European Rapid Reaction Force, which can plausibly be viewed as a vehicle for enhancing and extending the EU’s capacity to make policeinterventions beyond its borders (cf. Hardt and Negri, 2000: 18-19; Statewatch, 2000a; Caygill, 2001). Such developments raise a host of issues - whose ‘police’ go where? for what purposes? upon whose authority? with what form of legitimacy? - that go to the heart of the new security constellation emerging in Europe.

Europol has since 1999 produced two versions of its annual report, a promotional public document (from where this quote is taken) and a version marked ‘Limite’ which, though unclassified, is not routinely released to the EU institutions (Statewatch, 2000b).

Mention ought also to be made in this context of the proposals put forward in June 2001 by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin - in the course of their otherwise divergent schemes for the future of European integration - for the further expansion of Europol and for the establishment of a European border police, a body that would assume a visible presence (in sites such as international airports) and possess operational powers (Jospin, 2001: 4; Schröder, 2001: 7).

This restless institutional innovation is, however, a feature European policing shares with other dimensions of the wider European polity. Unlike modern European states - whose builders often took great steps to recover or invent lines of historical connection between the state and an antecedent (ethnic) nation, the EU was consciously constructed as a revolt against Europe’s violent, nationalistic past - a past that has long since functioned as its Other (Waever, 1996: 122). The EU’s polity-building thus appears to stand in constant fear of institutional stagnation and to seek legitimation through recourse to future-oriented myths (Shore, 2000: 206).

This paper aims to develop two organizing thematics of my recent work on policing and security - one concerned with local/national cultures of policing (e.g. Loader, 1997), the other with policing and governance (e.g. Loader, 2000) - in the direction of Europe. In so doing, I also hope to make some small contribution to making good what Joseph Weiler (1999: 86) has recently described as ‘a real dearth of ideological and cultural scrutiny’ in EU studies (see, however, Shore, 2000).

This theoretical perspective on policing and the social is set out in greater length in Loader (1997). An attempt to think through its implications for the connections between police, nation and statehood can be found in Loader and Walker (2001: 20-25).

I use the term ‘field’ here - following Bourdieu - to mean a structured space of positions within which individual and collective actors struggle for dominance; struggles whose outcome, Bourdieu maintains, depends on the distribution among such actors, and the deployment by them, of specific forms of ‘capital’ - economic, symbolic and cultural. A lively introduction to this and homologous terms within Bourdieu’s sociology can be found in Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992).

This shared ‘feel’ seems likely to include the realization that ‘Euro-crime’ offers a vehicle through which police organizations can demand - and attract - new resources, whether in the form of jobs, powers or technology.

We should also take cognisance here of the burgeoning role that private security companies are performing, not only - to varying degrees - within specific nation-states across Europe, but also in shaping developments transnationally (deWaard, 1999). While much of the private security industry continues to comprise small to medium-sized companies operating on a local, regional or national basis, there exist a number of firms whose involvement in the production and marketing of security services is now global in its reach (Johnston, 2000). As agents operating in many nation-states (but strongly rooted in none), and driven by a combination of commercial imperatives and free market dispositions, they are beginning to play an important - and very particular - role in the securitization of Europe, not least in mushrooming security markets in the post-communist east.

Walker (1998; 2000b) has noted that ‘federalism’ has at various points provided a further imaginative resource for those seeking to develop a more robust European policy capacity, with a European police force standing - like flags, anthems, passports and other icons of nationhood - as a potent symbol of the emergent European state. Having reached a high point in the early 1990s with the formation of Europol the related elements of this federalist project seem of late to have both lost some political impetus and confidence and to have become uncoupled from one another. Proposals to enhance European policing now rarely deploy this particular nation-building rhetoric (see, for instance, Jospin, 2001; Schröder, 2001).

The European Union was, of course, originally conceived as a security project - one whose raison d’être was the pacification of inter-state violence in Europe. The important exception of the Balkans notwithstanding, this goal has been largely accomplished; the great success of the European project having been to ‘domesticate’ relations between European states and to rule out ‘anti-political’ acts between them (Waever, 1996). Yet this very accomplishment has - as Weiler (1999: 257) observes - served to rob ‘peace’ and ‘order’ of their mobilizing force as ideals legitimating further political integration.

This frenetic level of activity and policy formation has, it should be remembered, taken place in a domain where the European Commission largely lacks rights of initiative and specific legislative competence - much of it, as I have already indicated, taking the form of ‘soft law’. This suggests that the distinction between inter-governmental and supranational policy-making that is so often mobilized in discussions of the EU and its futures is notproving decisive in this field, at least at the level of ‘getting things done’. The baleful effects of inter-governmentalism on the transparency and accountability of decision-making are, of course, another matter.

The avoidance of these tendencies requires us to grasp more fully the paradox that the goals associated with security (order, safety, trust, etc.) can most effectively be realized, not by the conscious, directed pursuit of ‘security’ policies and discourse, but - as Waever (1998: 92) nicely has it - ‘by doing other things’ (see further, on the ‘paradoxes of security’, Berki, 1986: ch. 2). The example Waever gives in this regard concerns the formation of western European states into a ‘security community’ in the 1950s and sixties, a process carried out, not by thinking in terms of security/insecurity, but by taking broader steps towards economic and political integration. The lesson he draws from this is as follows: ‘For practitioners, to concentrate on non-security matters might be a sound security strategy’ (ibid.: 71).

The aforementioned role that commercial security operatives are playing in processes of securitization within Europe merely compound these questions of distribution and accountability still further.

Consider in this regard the recent politics of asylum in Britain. It is likely - outside a number of specific locations - that few British citizens have ever known, met, or knowingly seen, or even know anyone who has known, met, or seen, an asylum-seeker. As such, individuals have little situated knowledge with which to filter dominant media and political scripts about how to make sense of, and respond to, asylum; and the issue is to this extent being played out ideologically almost entirely at the level of popular imagination. The New Labour government - to its shame - has done much to fuel this imagination, little to counter it.

published in Criminal Justice (special issue on ‘How Does Crime Policy Travel?) 2002, 2/2: 125-153, and in T. Newburn and R. Sparks (eds.) Criminal Justice and Political Cultures: National and International Dimensions of Crime Control. Cullompton: Willan.

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