Transnational Crime: Europe’s Collective Existential Security Threat?

Transnational organized crime has long been the domain of law enforcement. Tracking criminal syndicates profiting from illicit flows of drugs, counterfeit material, human trafficking, weapons, money and contraband has been the task of specialized police and investigative units external pagesince the American Prohibition era of the 1920scall_made. Yet, the technological, economic and social changes of the last decade have altered the threat posed by transnational criminal networks beyond the concerns of interdicting or managing the problem via constabulary forces. Today, the hazards that organized crime pose require its elevation to the grand strategy level of national and regional security if states hope to preserve their integrity in the future.

While the external pageUnited Scall_madetates and external pageUnited Kcall_madeingdom readily acknowledge that organized crime now poses a threat to national security that lies beyond the reach of traditional law enforcement, the same can hardly be said of their European Union (EU) counterparts. Instead, the challenges posed have yet to gain enough urgency at the political level to help revitalize what is currently a patchwork approach to countering organized crime that is still predominantly handled by law enforcement agencies. Indeed, the primary international document that seeks to address organized crime remains the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNCTOC, also known as the Palermo Convention). At 14 years old, the Convention effectively predates the rise of our digital society and the growing ability of organized criminals to exploit information, infrastructure, logistics and contacts.

Above and Beyond the Law?

Yet, unlike terrorism, whose outsize capacity to shock and provoke has led to its prominence in national security assessments, organized crime hides in plain sight. The increasingly embedded nature of transnational crime within legal, military and political structures often takes the form of unsuspected daily activity, such as customs officers helping external pageshipping containerscall_made containing drugs, illegal wildlife or humans pass through a port; external pageelected officialscall_made propped up by laundered money and gang ties; or diplomats distributing external pagefake visascall_made.

Terrorism’s gruesome visibility, its rootedness in zones where conflict and commerce (especially in the extractive industries) meet, not to mention its practicality as a strategic political catalyst (both for its perpetrators as well as its purported conquerors), encourages the diversion of significant multilateral global resources towards quelling the violence. By contrast, most states are confined to pursuing criminal cartels at the local or national level, even though the transnational nature of illicit flows defies the validity of this approach. The 20^th century conception of cartels operating in one region with one product (whether that product is drugs or arms, for example) is now outmoded. And new potential commodities like external pagefoodcall_made, external pagebiowarecall_made and external pagecomputer virusescall_made, and clients like terrorists add to the risk factors.

Globalization and technological connectivity have also supersized the ambition of transnational syndicates: their scope is international, multi-disciplinary and sophisticated enough to pose a true threat to a state’s command and control structures. Consider external pagethe 2006 attack by the Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC)call_made, Brazil’s largest organized crime gang, against the government for transferring gang members to different prisons. In just external pagetwo dayscall_made, the PCC paralyzed Sao Paulo, the financial capital of Brazil and a city of 19 million people, leaving hundreds dead and Brasilia on notice that its police and military were completely vulnerable.

Moreover, the current diversification of criminal networks helps to ensure that decreases in any one particular illicit flow can be quickly substituted by increases in other items in order to maintain profitability. What distinguishes organized crime groups today is the importance of how they sell over what they sell. New logistics systems and new routes external pagecharacterize this transformationcall_made. Transnational crime groups are adopting the supply chain mechanics of giant retailers external pagelike Wal-Mart and Amazoncall_made (Krache Morris, 2013). By exploiting the corruption and conflict of fragile states in regions like West Africa and Eastern and Central Europe, transnational criminal networks can open external pagenew logistics routescall_made to get products into the affluent markets of Europe and elsewhere.

Three Key Problems

The vast temporal dissonance between how quickly transnational crime groups are adapting technological advances to their advantage and how slowly political bureaucracies are enacting measures to blunt the efficacy of illicit networks lies at the root of how the future of organized crime will affect national security. To address the threat of transnational crime in Europe, three key problems must be resolved.

Perhaps the most critical impediment to offsetting the risks of transnational criminal activity in Europe is the lack of a common definition of terms and approaches. Despite various EU attempts starting as early as 1993 (when the EU Council of Ministers of Justice and Interior Affairs commissioned the Working Groups on Drugs and Organized Crime, the first attempt to measure organized crime in Europe), the disparity between how differing EU member states external pagedefine and collect information on organized crime groupscall_made has diluted every effort to address the problem (van der Heiden, 1996). Even the use of the term “organized crime” has declined in favor of the term “serious crime,” which reflects the European attempt to shift the focus from the structure of criminal groups to the harm they inflict. This lack of unity within Europe on how to categorize the problem aggravates the difficulty in identifying it.

The second obstacle is the lack of interdictive capacity at the regional level. Europe has external pageseveral agenciescall_made that deal with cross-border crime, with the likes of EUROPOL, FRONTEX, and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) among the most prominent. However, due to the precedence that European member states take in their own law enforcement and security, none of these organizations have executive powers along the lines of the American Department of Justice (DOJ) and its component agencies the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), even though cooperation between the US and European entities occurs regularly. In addition, this alphabet soup of agencies must also contend with the role played by state militaries. This multi-layered security coverage of militaries, law enforcement and information agencies, while interoperable to some degree, exposes the gaps and overlapping duplication that characterizes the current frontline in the fight against transnational organized crime. Accordingly, the asymmetrical fluency which empowers transnational crime networks to elude detection and interdiction is not matched by the current patchwork of organizations tasked to stop them.

The third problem is defined and shaped by the previous two: without a common definition of what constitutes transnational crime, and without a coordinated interdictive structure that can halt perpetrators’ activities effectively, Europe will remain without a unified and comprehensive prosecutorial plan of action for when criminal networks are brought to justice. The complexity of weaving through individual member-state legal codes and international law statutes and the expense such processes incur are simply unsustainable as policy. Moreover, the lack of a common prosecutorial pathway only adds to the bureaucratic time lag that crime networks can use to their advantage in refining and honing their operations.

To address these three problems, EU member states must band together and urgently renew regional and transcontinental efforts to address the growth of transnational crime networks as a matter of national and regional security, rather than as an outcropping of law enforcement measures . Achieving this feat in the EU raises the specter of political federalization—a prospect that has always eluded collective agreement within the Union. But the transnational threat that Europe faces is potentially existential, as it confronts challenges from gangs in the Americas to the West, threats from Russian and Eurasian syndicates to the East, as well as powerful Italian, Albanian and non-European operators. Consequently, the EU will need to consider whether the complex—and to some, distasteful—trade-off of national interests is more palatable than sovereign erosion through criminal intervention.

Regardless of which path the EU takes, the fact remains that the growth of transnational crime appears inexorable. Unless states and institutions prepare to unite on the identification, interdiction and prosecution of transnational crime by addressing its global and multilateral scale, the next decade will witness the effects of its expansion and entrenchment into Europe.

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