Distinguishing European criminology: A metatheoretical argument

David Smith's inaugural editorial of the European Journal of Criminology justifies European criminology in terms of a distinctive tradition, defined primarily in relation to a hegemonic, universalising, American social science. By contrast, a distinctively European criminology can offer a ‘much wider view of the world’ given its ‘variegated’ contexts and cultures of control that enable, indeed oblige, comparative research. Smith identifies the greater leverage provided in Europe than in the USA for comparative analysis and notes how this is central to avoiding another kind of false universality: that of assuming the ubiquity of grand narratives about crime and control such as Merton's theory of strain, Foucault's thesis on the shift from punishment to discipline or Garland's identification of a late-modern culture of control. In this paper, subsequent progress on this promise of European criminology is considered in terms of the fundamental tension in comparative research between seeking uniformity and seeking uniqueness. It is argued various forms of false universality (the presumption of generalities) and false uniqueness (the assertion of exceptional cases) are better avoided through a metatheoretical concern with substantive, necessary and contingent, relations of connection rather than with formal relations of similarity and difference. It is through the discovery of ‘contingent necessities’ that the distinctiveness of European criminology is better appreciated alongside other emergent criminological traditions within the global criminology of the 21st century. This metatheoretical argument is illustrated through the ‘filtering’ of online harms by offline regimes of governance and regulation such as the European Union's Digital Services Act and Artificial Intelligence Act.