General context

For non-European readers, it may be helpful here to give a short general context for politics, policing and police leadership in Europe. We draw your attention also to the historical outline provided in Chapter One, which tries to contextualise European policing in the period immediately prior to the French Revolution of 1789 and thereafter. The Revolution and its aftermath in the Napoleonic Empire (1799-1815) did much to shape subsequent policing structures in Europe; indeed, dismantling or modifying that Napoleonic legacy may still be in progress.

The European Union (EU)

Europe as a modern entity came into existence in the aftermath of the Second World War. Not only did Europe need rebuilding after the effects of war had damaged many countries’ infrastructures, but there was also a strong political will to rebuild Europe along federal lines, so as to obviate the dominance of the Continent by a single European power and to reduce to a minimum the possibilities of further conflict. This is what Ian Bache and his colleagues describe as ‘moves towards a consensual approach to European unity’ (Bache et al, 2011, p. 81). Additionally, the new politics of the ‘Cold War’ meant that the United States exercised considerable influence on post-war Europe (not forgetting its strong military presence in NATO and in West Germany). Bache et al comment on the birth of modern Europe that ‘[t]he signing of the Treaty of Paris in April 1951 by the governments of Belgium, France, [West] Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands […] began the process commonly referred to as European integration’ (Bache et al, 2011, p3).

These core members with their ‘Common Market’, later embraced (more or less willingly) countries on their peripheries to grow to 15 states in the European Community (EC) by the 1990s, but, after reintegration of a united Germany in 1991, the second major expansion of the renamed EU occurred in 2004, when eight ‘aspirant’ countries from the former Soviet Union, joined as newly fledged democracies (Cameron, 2004).