10.25364/02.8:2021.2.1
Kantokoski, Olga
Olga
Kantokoski
University of Helsinki
The Politics of Euro-Balkan Police Cooperation in the 2000s
Universität Graz
2021
Article
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
This article examines the political dynamics of Euro-Balkan police
cooperation in the context of recent Balkan history. In the existing
scholarship, the process of the ‘externalisation’ of EU-wide law enforcement
cooperation outside the Union's geographic frontiers is widely considered to
be a ‘functional-instrumental’ response to the menace of organised crime.
Scholars believe that the functional rationale has been a primary driver
behind the Union's endeavours to extend its governance of internal security
to the EU's core strategic neighbourhood of the Western Balkans. Perceived
in EU political discourse as a ‘stronghold’ of organised crime, in the 2000s
this region acted as a major site for the Union's counter-crime initiatives.
However, more detailed examination of the EU’s internal security
collaboration in the Western Balkan region against the contrasting
dynamics of organised crime reveals that Euro-Balkan cooperative
initiatives were not functionally-, but rather politically-driven par
excellence. In this article, the crucial period of 1999/2000-2010, when
collaboration on internal security issues with the Western Balkan partners
assumed major significance for the EU, is examined as an example of how
political factors have been major triggers of the Union's anti-crime police
cooperation with its Balkan neighbourhood.
Keywords:
European Union, Western Balkans, organised crime, police
cooperation
Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 2021, 8(2), 1-23