Security Sector Reform as a Contribution to Crime Prevention in South Eastern Europe

Abstract

The radical changes in the world order over the past several years make the issue of dealing with organized crime both more important and at the same time so much more difficult. All that is happening against this background is tied to the events of September 11, just like the emergence of the previous world order was tied to the Treaty of Westphalia, which is basically a good tool to illustrate what these changes really were. Organized crime is all too well suited to these changes, unfortunately, and we cannot deal with it without addressing the changes in general. The new world order is mainly characterized by the appearance of non-state actors who don’t look like states, don’t behave like states, and don’t want to behave like states. Therefore, all the instruments at our disposal that were geared to dealing with states do not work when addressing these non-state actors. The world has seen similar non-state actors before, but these actors, like the Catholic Church, or more recently the entities which have tried to gain independence from larger state structures—like the Nagorno Karabakhs, the Kosovos, and the Abkhazias of this world—have always had a desire to be viewed and treated as if they were states. And this is basically how the world treated these entities, an approach that wound up creating tremendous problems, but one that at least gave us some tools to deal with them. With the new breed of non-state actors, such as organized crime or terrorism, these tools are no longer effective, since these entities have constituted themselves in direct opposition to these instruments. The desire of Kosovo or Nagorno Karabakh was to fit into the existing order of states, to be recognized as one of them. These new actors do not want to fit into this order—they want to destroy it, and this is a tremendous difference. There is a difference between organized crime and terrorism, however, because global terrorism wants to destroy the system as it is presently ordered, whereas organized crime wants to use the system to its advantage, thereby destroying it. But they are nevertheless natural allies, because they have very similar features and very similar objectives. The collapse of the old world order—the Westphalian order, if you will—has many consequences, most of which I do not want to discuss here but which we will have to face in the decades to come. Just to name a few: the collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, which we do not want to recognize, but which