Security and Cross-Border Political Crime: The Formation of Transnational Security Regimes in 18th and 19th Century Europe

Abstract

Sicherheit und grenzubergreifende politische Kriminalitat: Die For mierung transnationaler Sicherheitsregime in Europa im 18. und 19. Jahrhun dert*. This contribution proposes to observe Foucault's concept of the security from the angle of transnational security and criminal law regimes. Since the late 18th century security and securitization became not only a prime category and field of national policies and discourses but were increasingly in fluenced by transnational issues and cross-border security threats (or narra tives) such as crime, transnational political violence and interna tional conspiracies. This was accompanied by the formation of transnational security regimes, which concerned cross-border security policies, discourses and legal norms in the fields of extradition, political asylum, and police co operation, with a variety of different actors: states, police organizations, ex perts, organizations. These transnational security regimes and their respective fields were characterized by complex interdependencies and interactions as well as by legal pluralism, flexibility, fragmentation, collisions, and Entrechtlichung, transgressing national security and extending securitiza tion to indefinite global security spaces. Though this could be interpreted as an international security dispositive it as well challenges Foucault's concept which, in the end, should be substituted by the historical model of transna