Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State

The paper uses the rubric of the postmodern to achieve a distancing from the verisimilitudes of programmatic realism in order to better discuss the phenomenon of the transnationalization of policing. In addition, it offers an overview of the legal, organizational, and technological infrastructures that comprise police co-operation in the European Theatre of Operations. It argues that transnationalization of the police enterprise is ongoing, emergent and, to a great extent, opaque. The apparently fragmented nature of this enterprise comes in spite of the feeling that Europe urgently requires a security blanket. What appears to be emerging is a patchwork quilt of agencies, stitched together by the efforts of transnational liaison officers. It is common garden folk-devilry that establishes a pattern for that patchwork quilt.