NCJ Number
195807
Journal
Criminal Justice Volume: 2 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2002 Pages: 125-153
Date Published
2002
Length
29 pages
Annotation
This article presents a discussion of expanding police powers on a supranational level, which poses a potential threat to democracy in European nations.
Abstract
The author has two main goals for this article; first, to develop a framework for understanding the enhanced policing capacity in Europe that extends across borders as it tries to contain an increasingly complex criminal network. Second, the author seeks to understand the problems of authorization and legitimation that have been raised by these types of policing practices. The author is concerned with establishing a sense of postnational democracy in the face of the ever-extending police powers in Europe. These police powers have been justified and legitimized through the narratives of increasing threats that others pose to the security of European nations. No longer is crime contained in particular localities; in today’s modern world, borders become blurred, threatening security on a grand scale. Thus, the author writes of inter-governmental cooperation on policing-related matters in order to subdue such threats. The argument made here, however, is that democracy in these nations must be jealously guarded against expanding police powers. The emergence of supranational institutions threatens the fabric of modern democracy on a grand scale. These supranational institutions are legitimized by the fear incited by transnational criminal networks. It is the authors’ intentions in this article to bring awareness of the emergence of these modes of cross-border policing in order to elicit public discourse concerning democratic supervision of these supranational institutions. Notes, references