Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law

Project Topic

Long regarded as an issue concerning only a limited number of nations, since the early 1990s organised crime has been recognised as a problem of serious concern and has become a “hot topic” in the public debate and on the political and scientific agenda throughout Europe. To control organised crime, far-reaching legal and institutional reforms have been passed in all European states and ad hoc instruments have been adopted by all major international organisations, ranging from the European Union (EU) to the Council of Europe and the United Nations.
Despite this flurry of initiatives, very little comparative research has so far been conducted on the perception and empirical patterns of organised crime in Europe, or on the concrete implementation and effectiveness of the organised crime control policies adopted by the EU and the single European States.

Project Aim

The present project and its resulting book “Organised Crime in Europe: Concepts, Patterns and Control Polices in the European Union and Beyond”, which was published in 2004 by Springer, aimed to fill the above-mentioned research gap. They constitute the first attempt systematically to compare organised crime concepts, as well as historical and contemporary patterns and control policies in thirteen European countries. Among these there are seven “established” EU Member States (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom), two “new” Eastern European members (the Czech Republic and Poland), a candidate country (Turkey), and three non-EU countries (Albania, Russia and Switzerland).

Project Approach

Thirty-three experts from different legal and social disciplines were asked to write detailed country reports on either the historical or current patterns of organised crime or the control policies. Reports from five countries (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia and Turkey) were collected for the book first part, which concerns the history of organised crime. Reports from all the thirteen selected countries were obtained for the two following parts, involving organised crime patterns and control policies, respectively.

The experts were asked to write their reports on the basis of a standardised research protocol, which was developed by the two principal investigators. The protocol was discussed in a preliminary meeting, which was held in Freiburg in December 2001. A conference was held, again in Freiburg, in late February 2003 to discuss the first drafts of the country reports. After receiving feedback from the principal investigators, the experts submitted their final reports in the course of 2003. The reports were edited and compared by the principal investigators. In addition to lengthy comparative chapters at the end of each section, these also wrote introductory chapters on the history of the organised crime concept, Europe-wide research on organised crime and its related control policies as well as the policy initiatives of the European Union and the Council of Europe.

Project Funding

The project was partially funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung.

Project Results

The project ended in late 2004 with the publication of an over 1,000 page-long book by Springer: “Organised Crime in Europe: Concepts, Patterns and Control Polices in the European Union and Beyond”. The main projects results were presented at a conference in Brussels, which was ad hoc organised by the Dutch Presidency of the European Union.

The project results can be summarised in the following seven propositions:

1. Though much of the concern about organised crime was initially dictated by fear of the expansion of the Italian mafia to the whole of Europe and to its becoming a model for others involved in organised crime, these pessimistic scenarios have not been realised. Neither have Italian mafia groups invaded the rest of Europe, nor have other organised crime groups shown any interest in imitating the Italian mafia’s culture, structure or struggle for political dominion.
2. Recognising the relatively “disorganized” (Reuter, 1983) nature of European organised crime does not imply an optimistic assessment of its nature, scale and danger. Forming flexible and changeable networks, the small and ephemeral enterprises comprising the bulk of European organised crime have, since the mid-1970s, sustained a phenomenal expansion of illegal markets in Western and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in Eastern Europe as well.
   Since the early 1970s a rising demand for a variety of illegal drugs has fostered the development of an international drug trade from producing to consumer countries and the emergence of nationwide drug distribution systems in all European states. This was followed by a second wave of expansion involving the rise of a human smuggling and trafficking industry, which was largely triggered by the enactment of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in most Western European countries during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the re-conversion of many professional criminals to drug trafficking and dealing, several other - traditional and non-traditional - profit-making criminal activities have continued to proliferate.
3. Notwithstanding the serious shortcomings of information sources, it can safely be stated that in most Western European countries traditional organised crime groups’ ability to infiltrate the legitimate economy and corrupt civil and political institutions was grossly overstated when organised crime began to attract media and political attention in the early 1990s. Even in Western Europe, however, there are two main exceptions to this rather reassuring picture: Italy and Turkey.
4. In some Eastern European countries organised crime still has a different quality. Some Eastern European criminal groups, in particular the Russian ones, do not exclusively comprise “underworld” criminals, but also “overworld” figures, who often originate from the ranks of the former Communist Party and state structures and are today successful entrepreneurs or high-ranking government officials.
   Whereas many Eastern European countries are well advanced in closing the legal and institutional gap separating them from Western standards, and some of them joined the European Union in 2004, other countries, such as Russia and Albania, still need to set up a viable legal framework to regulate the legitimate economy and to separate clearly the latter from the underground and tout court criminal economies.
5. It is by no means excessive to say that, in Europe, policy on organised crime has increasingly transcended national boundaries and since the late 1990s become a matter of international politics and hence also of the foreign policy of individual countries. The internationalisation of organised crime control policy well explains why the changes that have taken place on several fronts in individual countries are so similar, whether they involve the centralisation of the police, the judiciary and the customs authorities, or the creation of special units within these institutions, or the introduction of intrusive methods of investigation, such as phone tapping, anonymous witnesses and undercover agents.
6. Organised crime control policies remain controversial. Despite the EU pressure, in many countries the development of an organised crime control policy not only required a great deal of lengthy debate, but also could only really get off the ground when murders or scandals had created sufficient support for the new policy initiatives.
7. Further research is needed on organised crime, particularly on the effectiveness of organised crime control policies.