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Abstract
This article deals with the reshuffling of policing within the strong states of Continental Europe. It is argued that scholars should take social history into account because it shows that the problematic tension in security matters in Continental Europe is not public/ private, which the public sector has become able to deal with fairly well over the long term, but local/national—a central tension in the history of the formation of the countries of Continental Europe characterized by a fairly strong state tradition. Use of the “governance” vulgate, or of a concept like “multilateralization, should be resisted, and it is contended that the local/national tension determines the public/private tension. Moreover, the constitution of what should be termed “risk management bureaucracies” at the local level in large European cities underscores an astonishing comeback of the local level in the measurement and management of urban risks. It is as if the infra‐national level intended to regain the role of interface it once played by acting as a mediator between a private sector that sells and manages surveillance and protection technologies, and a public sector that is content with regulating at a distance the activities of private actors within a newly controlled logic of security co‐production.
Notes
Correspondence to: Jérôme Ferret, Research Fellow, IHESI—Institut des Hautes Études de la Sécurité Intérieure, 19 rue Péclet, 75015 Paris, France and Escola de Policia de Catalunya, area de recerca, C‐17, 135 Cra., km 135, 08100 Mollet del Vallès, Apartat de Correus 158, Spain. E‐mail: [email protected]. This paper was translated from the French by Laurent Laniel, who also provided useful comments on earlier drafts.
This is based on a comment by Dominique Monjardet in reaction to the presentation of Clifford D. Shearing's paper “The Nodalization of Regulatory Space: Rethinking the Governance of Security” during the international symposium “Reconfiguring Policing” organized by IHESI in Paris on 4 July 2002.
Crawford (1997) presents a comprehensive summary review of these schools of thought and the different Anglo‐Saxon “theses”.
A recent example is the international conference “In Search of Security” that took place in Montreal, Canada, in February 2003. A cursory look at the titles of workshops and papers is enough to demonstrate the crushing hegemony of the concept of “governance”, while a closer examination reveals the gap between “Continental” and “Anglo‐Saxon” papers.
This competition of tasks occurs first at the national level and the level of the autonomous communities. However, it is also a feature of the relationship between the police forces of the autonomous communities (where such forces exist: Catalonia, has a total of 8,300 policemen, while there are 55,000 officers in the Policía Nacional) and the local forces (municipal police forces in cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants), which also claim a role in the management of municipal affairs. Observing the power relations between the local (municipal) police forces and those of the autonomous communities confirms that it is difficult to locate the police function. The same problems caused by the difficulty of defining proximity occur between the national and autonomous community forces. Note that this is not a competition between proximity and community, but between two distinct conceptions of community. Exaggerating somewhat, one could say that the autonomous community police wishes to become more integral and “national” on its own regional territory due to the fact that it coordinates local forces, which themselves yearn to become more autonomous by reference to municipal autonomy.
