ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a heuristic framework that can help to make better sociological sense of both the meanings and interests that are competing to shape the field of European policing, and the processes of securitization that presently dominate it. It considers the problems of authorization and legitimation raised by the onset of thinly accountable police processes and institutions at the European level, and to offer a sketch of the issues that must be addressed, and the criteria that might orientate, in seeking to advance a project of postnational democracy. Centred mainly around the European Union (EU), this process has resulted in the dispersal across borders of the means of legitimate surveillance and-potentially-violence. The vision of an integrated, European wide law enforcement action against international organized crime was a reality. Eric Hobsbawm, 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.
