The New European Criminology

Crime and Social Order in Europe

Vincenzo Ruggiero, Nigel South, Ian Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134714803
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The New European Criminology gathers together leading criminologists from all over Europe to consider crime and responses to crime within and across national borders. For the first time it allows students to experience the most exciting work in European criminology and to compare approaches to crime in different parts of Europe.
The five sections of the book look at:
* the effects of European harmonisation on crime
* criminal justice, law enforcement and penal reform
* organised crime, from the Mafia in Italy to drug running in the Balkans
* local crime in international contexts
* possible future directions for criminology and some suggestions for a new criminology of war.

Part I
EUROPEAN PROSPECTS

1
CRIME, MARKET-LIBERALISM AND THE EUROPEAN IDEA

Ian Taylor

To the extent to which the resistance in Scandinavia and other places in Europe is directed only against a Europe run by the Brussels bureaucracy, that is against a systematic unification process which does not yet have a shared political life-world to support it, to that extent these impulses could be transformed into a demand for a democratic Europe. The one true hurdle consists of the absence of a common public, of an arena for dealing with issues of common concern. Whether such a forum for communication will arise ironically depends mostly on intellectuals as a group who unceasingly talk about Europe without ever doing anything for it.

(Habermas 1996:16)

‘Market liberalism’ and crime across Europe

As we approach the end of the century, the advance of ‘economic liberalism’— or of a free market, untramelled (and, indeed, encouraged) by Governments— is observable right across Europe—from Ireland to Russia, from Spain to ‘social-democratic’ Scandinavia. So also are the far-reaching effects. Not least of these effects, of course, is the increase in unemployment across the European Community itself, which we identified in the introduction of the volume, and also a general economic polarisation of the broader society. This rapid ‘marketisation’ of Europe now extends as far as the culture and sport traditionally associated with the individual countries on the European continent. The Verona Opera is now marketed by the European tourism industry as much as La Scala in Milan; and on television across Europe the English Premier League is now as widely available as Serie A from Italy. Fashion shows from London are as heavily publicised as those in Paris and Milan, and we can watch rock-diving from Portugal as well as Alpine skiing, and cycling competitions from all over Europe, not just the Tour de France. We have a Europe, in fact, in which many new levels of social and cultural activity have rapidly become commodities for sale on the European (and in many instances the global) market.

The energetic advance of the ‘free market’ is closely associated with the advance of a set of what we might call ‘market liberal’ discourses in the public sphere of political and cultural commentary, most notably in the media of Europe. It is, above all, a discourse which identifies the viewer or the listener as a consumer of ‘goods’, and which glorifies the idea of choice across a range of different market places (unlimited tourist experiences, multiple channel televisions; a range of private health and personal insurance schemes, etc.). The most obvious examples of restless ‘market liberal’ talk are to be found on satellite and cable television programmes, especially their consumer, audience-participation or talk-show programmes, and in the popular-newspaper and popular-magazine press in Europe, apparently inexhaustible in their journalists’ constant search for new styles, new stars and new scandals. But this search for ‘new’ stories that will attract the attention of a jaded or exhausted audience is observable even in the quality newspapers of old Europe (from Die Zeit to the Guardian), but is most apparent in the mass-popular journalism of the new Europe (tabloid-style newspapers, the teenage and popular culture press, and voyeuristic magazines dedicated to the provision of ‘privileged’ glimpses of the lives of the wealthy and/or ‘the stars’ of media and popular culture). So, for example, Italian television (an extreme example, no doubt, as a result of the continuing influence of Mr Berlusconi and his Finnivest conglomerate) now appears like a seamless flow of the very latest images from the fast-changing market-place of popular culture—a mediascape in which, as Umberto Eco has so brilliantly described, everything appears as a part of the ‘hyper-reality’ of the post-modern world, governed only by ever-more satiated, restless consumer desires (Eco, 1985, 1995). The target of this daily exercise in dissemination of media messages is the individual viewer understood only as a consumer of and in the image market. Television in other European countries assumes a different specific shape from Italy, but the general pull in the direction of ‘market-liberalism’ as a taken-for-granted backdrop to television, radio and newspaper representation of the wider world is unmistakable almost everywhere.¹

Deeply embedded in this flow of television and media discourses, I would want to argue, is a specific set of market-liberal scripts (or ‘discourses’) which define the kinds of expectations placed on elected politicians and on different public and private agencies (schools, hospitals, police) responsible for the delivery of specific services in the market society. Absolutely fundamental a feature of this discursive logic is the idea that the citizen is to be thought of as a consumer who is ‘entitled’ (by virtue of financial power and payment, rather than for any other particular reason, e.g. ‘public importance’) to receive ‘service’ (good food, good health, good entertainment, or, indeed, as we shall argue, good policing) from different ‘providers’ in the market place.² So also there is embedded within this television discourse (both in fictional or entertainment programmes and in current-affairs reports) a very particular account of the problem of crime in various EC countries. My purpose in this paper is to try and identify some of these assumptions—indeed, to engage in the ‘deconstruction’ of these hegemonic media scripts. It is not my intention here to suggest that Europe’s problems with crime can be seen only as a media construction, but it is my concern to show that the discursive representation and reportage of such crime is of fundamental importance. I want to deal with five defining aspects of market-liberal discourses on crime in Europe—first, the question of crime and social anxiety; second, the curious couplet of the nation and the market; third, the question of The Other (with its recent descent into the issue of Evil) and the connected issue of ‘social exclusion’; fourth, the lionisation of an independent individual life in the market and the associated attack on social care; and, finally, I want to highlight the hyperbole— and, indeed the absence of doubt, reflexivity and ‘evaluation’—that is a characteristic feature of this market liberalism, apparently across much of Europe.

Crime and social anxiety

Market liberalism has a very particular perspective on the question of anxiety and the connected, highly topical field of risk. Being a discourse of the market society, of course, market liberalism is actively interested in encouraging a certain level of anxiety amongst citizens in general—on the one hand, in the case of citizen-workers, a certain level of job- and personal insecurity (as an encouragement to individual ‘competitivity’) and, on the other, in the case of citizen-consumers—as Vance Packard understood many years ago in his farsighted study of ‘built-in obsolescence’ (Packard 1961)—a certain productive level of insecurity with respect to the possession, or lack of possession, of the never-ending supply of new consumer goods. The willingness to take risks, especially of a financial kind, might be thought an essential attribute in the character-armour of the market entrepreneur, and certainly was so described in much of the earliest entrepreneurial free-market literature of the 1980s (cf. Keat and Abercrombie 1991). One continuing feature of the culture of the market in the 1990s is the emphasis which is placed on the widening of such risk-taking capacity or interest to a wider section of the population, as for example when taking out insurance, borrowing monies for the purchase of a home or entering directly into dealings in the stock and bond markets.

One of the most difficult problems for market individualists in the 1980s and 1990s has been that of deciding on the optimal acceptable level of regulation of such financial services markets. This is a continuing and unpredetermined issue within free-market societies. Even in the aftermath of a series of money-laundering, long-term frauds, and insider-trading scandals in Britain—the prospect for survival of the Serious Fraud Office, set up in the 1980s specifically to regulate this kind of serious economic fraud, is looking slim, despite the election of the new Labour Government. In Italy, the continuing struggles between Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and the Clean Hands judiciary can also be understood as a (very vigorous) debate about the appropriate parameters of legitimate business and government practice in competitive market environments (della Porta 1996, 1997); and current indications, in June 1997, suggest that many of the trials that were scheduled as a result of judicial investigations in the early 1990s may be about to be shelved.

So we would argue that there is a market liberal interest in encouraging a certain level of anxiety in individuals, in the name also of encouraging a vigorous mix of entrepreneurial and competitive culture (and also in the name of discouraging the malign and inert condition of ‘state dependency’). But there is a distinction between the kind of restless anxiety thought desirable amongst possessive individuals and a more generalised sense of anxiety about, or amongst, those without such a possessive advantage. In some European societies in the 1990s, the issue being raised is whether the free market in non-legitimate business activities (burglary, car theft, computer thefts, the drug trade, etc.) is beginning actually to threaten the overall sense of peace and order on which regular social exchange (including market exchange) must to some degree depend. There is a particularly intense anxiety in many European societies, for example, about the increases in rates of violent crime (see Table 1.1).

Anxieties about crime were in a sense confined just to the idea of violence ‘in the street’ or in other public spaces. Across Europe—but again to different degrees—fears about the safety of the private sphere of the household (in many ways, the more privileged or valued site of a consumer market society) were undermined by widely-reported increases in burglary and other kinds of intrusion (see Table 1.2).

Table 1.1 Increases in reported violent crime, 1987–1994

Table 1.2 Increases in reported rates of domestic burglary, 1987–1994

The high rates of victimisation of citizens of different European countries have been further confirmed by Professor van Dijk’s International Victimization Survey of 1992 and by a host of other surveys.³ Surveys also identify the increasing levels of fear and anxiety experienced by the citizens of these societies, firstly, with respect to the safety of public space in general (especially in the evening hours) and, secondly, of the private sphere of the household. There are some important issues here—not least as to whether the levels of anxiety expressed in such surveys are ‘really’ about crime and the chances of criminal victimisation, or whether the fears expressed about crime are actually a convenient and socially-approved kind of metaphor through which survey respondents can articulate, in a shorthand fashion, a much more complex sense of restlessness and anxiety—not least the general unease which a full-blown free-market environment produces culturally and psychologically.

The really distinctive characteristic of market liberalism’s response to the question of fear of crime and social anxiety is the idea that such matters, like the response of the consumer to other products and services, are in effect a ‘challenge to managers’—not least, in this instance, a challenge to managers of the police and legal systems in respect of their communication with ‘the public’ (the consumers). Both at national and local level, police and crime-prevention partnerships are put under pressure to explain how they are delivering their product—in this case, the different identifiable ‘outputs’ from their ongoing struggles against crime or social anxiety about crime. Writing some years ago about the United States’ unending ‘war against crime’, Jeffrey Reiman argued that it was in the interest of the managers of this struggle (the FBI and other federal agencies, as well as different police forces at the level of individual states) always to be seen to be losing, albeit in a noble and determined manner (sustaining what he called a Pyrrhic defeat): in this fashion, he argued, the agencies would continue to persuade the American tax-paying public of the seriousness of the criminal threat in America, and continue to vote through the budgetary dollars (Reiman 1979, 1984). In the cost-conscious, tax-cutting 1990s, however, this strategy carries serious risks (witness, for example, the imposition of stringent ‘performance measures’ and the encouragement given private security companies to respond to the new market demands for the delivery of crime-prevention or anxiety-reduction in competitive market societies). The increasing off-loading of whole sections or agencies of the criminal justice system to the private sector, coupled with the imposition of a variety of performance measures (for example, on police forces), gives a new importance to the language of evaluation and ‘payment by results’. In Britain, in the early 1990s, the other discursive strategy of the then Conservative Home Secretary—concerned to offer a demonstration of ‘outcome’ and ‘results’—was to focus on the rapid increase of the prison population, as evidence of the sheer number of ‘villains’ who had effectively been incapacitated and therefore were not any longer involved in crime. In this sense, Mr Howard actually wanted to run a demonstration project, declaring that ‘prison works’.⁴ In many European societies at the beginning of 1997, for example, one of the issues being most urgently investigated by many senior managers of European police forces was the recent, much-publicised success of the New York Police Department (NYPD) in producing sharp drops in recorded crime in that city. There was much interest in the re-organisation of the system of management that had apparently occurred in the NYPD earlier in the 1990s, and especially the introduction of computerised ‘crime pattern analysis’ systems and more flexible deployment of officers.⁵ There was also an increasing interest, that is, in the idea that the effective and more ‘systematic’ management of police forces (with the assistance of Close Circuit Television and/or computerised systems of pattern analysis) could produce a real reduction in the amount of actually-occurring crime, even in divided and marketised societies.

The nation and the market

One of the most important and definitive features of the crime problem in Europe is the fact of the internationalisation of its aetiology, set against the unremitting national organisation of social and political response. The spread of short-term and long-term unemployment is occurring, albeit unevenly, right across Europe (Judt 1996), as also are the processes of immiseration, and housing shortage, which are institutionalising a set of ghettoes⁶ in the inner-city or on the outer edges of Europe’s old industrial cities (Wiles 1993). The homeless people and vagrants begging on the streets—the new Gypsies of the late twentieth century— appear to have become a permanent feature of our cities. So these same social processes (with their various expressions in increasing rates of drug abuse, domestic violence, suicide and ill-health) are widespread amongst those millions of European citizens who have been unsuccessful in their struggle for a place in the competitive market society. We shall return to these citizens in our discussion of the phenomena of inclusion and exclusion. Our point for the moment is that the processes that are producing and intensifying, these problems are international, but the responses to them are only being framed at the level of individual nation-states, and it is increasingly clear that the national institutions are unable in and by themselves to respond. Generally speaking, the market, and not the nation-state, is sovereign.

The cutting-edge of what Edward Luttwak has identified as a new ‘turbo-charged’ ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THE NEW EUROPEAN CRIMINOLOGY
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A EUROPEAN CRIMINOLOGICAL COMMUNITY
• PART I: EUROPEAN PROSPECTS
• PART II: PENALITY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE
• PART III: CRIMINAL BUSINESS
• PART IV: THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE LOCAL
• PART V: HORIZONS