Transnational Organised Crime

Perspectives on Global Security

Adam Edwards, Peter Gill, Adam Edwards, Peter Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134419401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

The perceived threat of 'transnational organized crime' to Western societies has been of huge interest to politicians, policy makers and social scientists over the last decade. This book considers the origins of this crime, how it has been defined and measured and the appropriateness of governments' policy responses. The contributors argue that while serious harm is often caused by transnational criminal activity - for example, the trafficking in human beings - the construction of that criminal activity as an external threat obscures the origins of these crimes in the markets for illicit goods and services within the 'threatened' societies. As such, the authors question the extent to which global crime can be controlled through law enforcement initiatives, and alternative policy initiatives are considered. The authors also question whether transnational organised crime will retain its place on the policy agendas of the United Nations and European Union in the wake of the 'War on Terror'.

Part I
Origins of the concept

The three chapters in Part I question where the concept of transnational organised crime (TOC) came from, why it came to dominate official discourse on the contemporary security of Western social orders and what the consequences have been for the emergence of a ‘global’ law enforcement regime or, more provocatively, a global ‘protection racket’.

Mike Woodiwiss’s chapter distinguishes between ‘limited’ and archaic conceptions of TOC. Whilst the latter has a long historical provenance, in terms of governmental concerns over the smuggling of contraband and consequent circumvention of customs and excise duties, the former has its origins in more recent policy discourse on the perceived threat from ‘Mafia-type organisations’ to the integrity of Western political-economies. Woodiwiss traces the frenetic policy-making activity on this threat, which occurred in international fora such as the United Nations, G7/P8 and European Union over the past decade, back to the domestic security concerns of the US Federal Government after the Second World War. In the context of the pre-war New Deal, Roosevelt’s administration had emphasised the opportunities for organised crime that were generated by poor corporate governance and the connivance of ‘respectable society’ and had, consequently, implemented reforms to reduce these opportunities. Post-war federal administrations, however, eschewed this focus on the inter-dependencies of licit and illicit business. Thus, in the context of McCarthyism, the focus of governmental discourse shifted to the threat presented by ethnic, ‘un-American’, outsiders, in particular from the Italian community, poisoning an ‘otherwise satisfactory’ political economy. The official imprimatur for this ‘alien conspiracy theory’ of organised crime was first given in the Kefauver Commission of 1950–1 and reiterated in subsequent Presidential Commissions on organised crime under Lyndon Johnson (1967) and Ronald Reagan (1983). Reagan’s Commission adapted this official discourse to acknowledge the increasing problem of drug trafficking as the principal basis for organised criminal activity and broadened the list of outsiders to include Asian and Latin American ‘cartels’. Throughout, the conceptualisation of organised crime as a problem of ethnic outsiders remained the same, as did the promotion of law enforcement strategies as the most appropriate policy response. In addition to ‘pluralising’ the alien conception of organised crime, the Reagan Commission was notable for hypothecating US ‘foreign assistance’ policy to the control of organised crime and recommending that aid to drug producing and trans-shipment countries should be reviewed on an annual basis in terms of the extent to which these countries comply with US crime control strategy.

For Woodiwiss, the concept of transnational organised crime has its origins in this internationalisation of US law enforcement, a process that included the colloquium held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC in September 1994 that included presentations from the Heads of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and gave birth to a ‘new global pluralist’ understanding of organised crime. Two months later this understanding underpinned the ‘World Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational Crime’ convened by the United Nations in Naples, which propelled the threat of TOC to the forefront of the international and foreign policy agendas of Western liberal democracies. In these terms TOC is portrayed as a specifically American idea exported, with increasing global reach, by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies through the threat of reductions in foreign assistance to those countries failing to sign-up to the US agenda (see Nadelmann, 1993).

Yet, it was suggested in the ESRC seminar discussions provoked by this chapter and other contributions that the Naples conference represented a coincidence of interests between the US, the member states of the European Union and the internal politics of the United Nations itself. It was argued that, by 1994, EU member states had already been forging a common security agenda around the threat of TOC; in particular, concerns over cross-border crime were a key facet of the Third Pillar of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, regarding issues of ‘Justice and Home Affairs’, including the establishment of the European Police Office (Europol), signed in 1992. The preoccupation of concerns over the threat of TOC to member states of the European Union was traced back further to debates over the criminogenic consequences of the removal of internal border controls in the Single Market; consequences that were anticipated in the establishment of the Shengen Group in June 1985, which, ‘included measures on visa regime harmonization, hot pursuit and the establishment of a computerized data exchange system–the Shengen Information System (SIS)’ (Benyon, 1996: 395). This ‘Europeanisation of crime and police issues’ has also been traced back further to the establishment of a number of ‘security clubs’ during the 1970s, such as Berne, Quantico, Vienna, Pompidou and TREVI, ‘partly in response to American attempts to control Interpol’, but also in response to ‘fears about political violence and radical fundamentalism, tales of urban insecurity, and immigration issues fused with concerns about the so-called “fourth freedom”: the freedom of movement’ (Bigo, 2000: 69–70). Thus, although there was resistance amongst EU policy elites to the simple adoption of US law enforcement strategies, their own perceptions of security led to broadly the same outcome.

The evolution of policy responses to TOC in the European Union since the Naples conference is covered specifically in Martin Elvins’s chapter. He traces this evolution from the Dublin European Council meeting of December 1996, at which the threat of TOC was first defined as a policy issue for the EU in its own right, through to the publication in December 2001 of a joint Commission–Europol report, ‘Towards a European Strategy to Prevent Organised Crime’. The joint report built upon the EU’s New Millennium strategy for the ‘Prevention and Control of Organised Crime’, announced in May 2000, which Elvins identifies as containing, ‘the definitive account of how the threat from TOC is conceived at EU level’. Significantly the New Millennium strategy acknowledges an increasing threat from organised criminal groups ‘outside the territory of the EU’, but identifies EU nationals and residents as posing ‘a significantly greater threat’. Organised crime is portrayed more in terms of an enemy within rather than as an alien conspiracy. Nonetheless, the strategy perpetuates the focus, common to official narratives of TOC, on groups of individuals who collaborate for prolonged periods of time and who threaten–whether from within or without–an otherwise satisfactory political economy, given their pursuit of profit and political power. The New Millennium Strategy makes this conception explicit in its depiction of groups that are, ‘strengthening their international criminal contacts and targeting the social and business structure of European society’. In these terms organised crime is defined in opposition to ‘legit’ European society, rather than as interdependent with this society, thereby reproducing the dichotomy of licit and illicit corporations, or the ‘underworld’ and ‘upperworld’, that has been so deeply entrenched in popular and policy discourse on organised crime (Edwards and Gill, 2002b). The actual interdependencies between nominally licit and illicit entrepreneurs are examined in greater detail in subsequent parts of this text (see also Block, 1991; Edwards and Gill, 2002a; Ruggiero, 2000;) but what is of importance here is Elvins’s suggestion that the threat of TOC is really the latest episode in a longer-running discourse on the security and definition of what the European Union stands for as an emerging social order. In this discourse, TOC is defined as both an internal and external threat to the project of European political and economic integration. Apropos Bigo’s (1994) concept of the ‘securitisation process’, Elvins’s chapter identifies how the threat of TOC has been used by European political elites to fortify their vision of European integration and how this vision has been advanced through a policy-making process that subordinates issues of transparency, accountability and open democratic deliberation over alternative conceptions of European social order and, ipso facto, the threats to this order (see also the chapters by King and Bogusz, Rawlinson and Goodey in Part III).

An implication of Elvins’s argument is that the promotion of concerns over TOC at the Naples conference coincided with, and suited the purposes of, the extant security discourse of EU policy elites. The chapter by Sheptycki expands this thesis further by drawing on Charles Tilley’s theory of ‘state-making as organised crime’. It is argued that the threat of TOC has increased in salience for Western policy elites over the past decade because it provided a useful device for legitimating their project of building institutions for governing the globe, post-Cold War, in accordance with their commitment to neo-liberal principles of political economy. Given their failure to provide substantive evidence on the scope and impact of this threat, Sheptycki argues that it is difficult to support official narratives on the ‘reality’ of TOC and the consequent argument that the development of transnational policing strategies is simply an enlightened and necessary response to security threats that cannot be addressed by nation-state authorities alone. For Sheptycki, the absence of such evidence, or even more sophisticated methodologies and research programmes that could illuminate the threat of TOC, justifies a more sceptical interpretation of the real factors that are driving policies for the co-ordination of international security and intelligence operations. He suggests that the real agenda is akin to a ‘protection racket’ in which the project of building a new, neo-liberal, world order is legitimated by law enforcement agencies that are ‘self-replicating and self-guiding’ in manufacturing various threats of TOC against which they can provide the necessary security. This agenda is discernible in the promotion of new technologies of control, such as ‘intelligence-led policing’, and new targets of control, such as the confiscation of criminal proceeds. In articulating the threat of TOC in this way, law enforcement agencies and their neo-liberal political masters establish themselves as the expert centres of authority on issues of global security. As a consequence, alternative conceptions of global security, which emphasise ‘the underlying conditions that produce crime in the first place’, are discredited or simply excluded from policy debates (see Edwards and Gill, 2000b).

Such exclusion is facilitated by the democratic deficit in global governance, wherein the transnational policing enterprise is left unfettered by politically accountable policy-making processes. Were these present, Sheptycki argues, it would be possible to shift the ethos of policy discourse on security away from the self-indulgent scaremongering of the protection racketeers towards a concern with the real causes of insecurity and social harm in the world, which he sees as the failure of political authorities to address questions of social justice, human rights, the rule of law and respect for the environment on a global scale. Whilst the prospects for this shift are even bleaker in the current, febrile, context of global security, following the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center of 11 September 2001, the nascent ‘War on Terrorism’ should not be allowed to preclude a more imaginative debate over security in the new world order.

The contributions to Part I and the seminar discussions provoked by them differ in attributing the origins of TOC to: the hegemonic influence of US domestic and foreign policy concerns; the process of European political and economic integration; the construction of a new, neo-liberal, world order; and even the utility of this threat for key actors within the United Nations, who were seeking to advance their own bureaucratic interests in increasing the profile of crime control on the UN’s policy agenda during the 1990s. Common to these interpretations, however, is scepticism about official narratives of the threat posed by TOC and the efficacy of those policing strategies entailed in these narratives. As Sheptycki argues, to be sceptical is not to deny the social harm that can be caused by the illicit activities that have been conflated into the idea of TOC, such as trafficking in drugs, people, nuclear materials and body parts. But we must also acknowledge the social harm caused by other practices, such as the dumping of toxic waste, insider dealing, tax evasion, fraud and the systematic corruption of state ‘kleptocrats’, that have, hitherto, been absent from policy discourse on the threat of TOC to global security. To recognise this broader repertoire of social harm and to acknowledge the possibility of governmental interventions that transcend the self-referential appeal for more refined law enforcement is to understand that global security is fundamentally a question of political deliberation, not technical expertise. Subsequent parts to this book examine the contribution that social scientific research on TOC can make to this deliberation.

References

Benyon, J. (1996) ‘The politics of police co-operation in the European Union’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 24: 353–79.

Bigo, D. (1994) ‘The European internal security field: stakes and rivalries in a newly developing area of police intervention’, in M. Anderson and M. den Boer (eds) Policing Across National Boundaries. London: Pinter.

——(2000) ‘Liaison officers in Europe: new officers in the European security field’, in J. Sheptycki (ed.) Issues in Transnational Policing. London: Routledge.

Block, A. (1991) Perspectives on Organised Crime: Essays in Opposition. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Edwards, A. and Gill, P. (2002a) ‘Crime as enterprise? The case of “transnational organised crime” ‘, Crime, Law and Social Change 37: 203–23.

——(2002b) ‘The politics of “transnational organised crime”: discourse, reflexiv-ity and the narration of “threat” ‘, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 4, 2: 245–70.

Nadelmann, E. (1993) Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement. University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Ruggiero, V. (2000) Crime and Markets: Essays in Anti-Criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 Transnational organised crime
The global reach of an American concept

Michael Woodiwiss

Transnational organised crime, in a literal sense, has a history as old as national governments and international trade. Piracy, cross-border brigandage, smuggling, fraud and trading in stolen or forbidden goods and services are ancient occupations that increased in significance as nation states were taking shape. Piracy and cross-border brigandage have now been banished to parts of the world where state authority is weak. However, the other occupations have flourished in recent years in most parts of the world, irrespective of the strength or weakness of the authority of individual states or the collective efforts of the international community.

Transnational organised crime in the limited sense that most commentators and policy-makers use has a much more recent history. Since the early 1990s, it has usually been used as a synonym for international gangsterism in general or the ‘Mafia’ or Mafia-type organisations, in particular. In this sense, ‘transnational organised crime’ has become a term that is now an integral part of the vocabulary of criminal justice policy-makers across the world. Many governments are in a continuous process of devising new ways to combat what for most is a newly discovered problem. Multilateral treaties, United Nations conventions and transnational law enforcement institutions are proliferating and intelligence agencies once fully employed in Cold War activities now take on such presumed entities as the ‘Mafia’, the ‘Camorra’, the ‘Yakusa’, the ‘Triads’ or any others that may be given a Mafia label as identification. These groups, according to experts cited in a 1993 United Nations discussion guide, effectively constitute organised crime since it ‘consists of tightly knit, highly organised networks of operatives that pursue common goals and objectives, within a hierarchical power structure that spans across countries and regions to cover the entire world’ (United Nations, 1993).

This chapter presents a brief outline of American efforts to conceptualise organised crime and transnational organised crime. It argues that the USA has successfully exported its analysis of organised crime problems despite evidence of its inadequacy.

Organised crime first became the subject of academic and professional study in the 1920s and 1930s. It is important to note, however, that organised crime was not such a loaded term then as now. The phrase was usually understood literally as ‘systematic criminal activity’ or as being synonymous with ‘racketeering’ and was not chiefly associated with specific criminal groups. The word ‘racket’ was by then well established as meaning an illegal business or fraudulent scheme and it followed that racketeering was understood to refer to such activities as dealing in stolen property, insurance frauds, fraudulent bankruptcies, securities frauds, credit frauds, forgery, counterfeiting, illegal gambling, trafficking in drugs or liquor, or various forms of extortion. It was also generally understood that criminal networks could and often did include the active involvement of police, politicians, judges, professionals, such as lawyers and accountants, and ostensibly legitimate businessmen. Indeed, as an early definitional article by Alfred Lindesmith (1941: 119) put it, ‘organised crime… requires the active and conscious co-operation of a number of elements of respectable society’. Most serious commentators also understood that fundamental political, legal and economic changes were necessary at local, state and national levels to reduce the damage done by organised crime.

The work of Raymond Moley, August Vollmer and most city or state crime surveys of the period made it clear that, as long as corruption and ineptitude existed in the law enforcement and criminal justice systems, organised criminal activity would flourish. For these comment...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Origins of the concept
• Part II: Measurements and Interpretations
• Part III: Case studies
• Part IV: Current and prospective responses