When Two Become One: Internal and external securitisations in Europe

Transcription

1 When Two Become One: Internal and external securitisations in Europe Didier Bigo Threats, Internal Security and Defence: some entanglements Society is undergoing fundamental transformations through the rise of new forms of governmentality in the Western world. The transnational is blurring the distinction between the internal and external, and destabilising related concepts: sovereignty, territoriality, security (Badie 1995). Sovereignty is meaningless and must be adjusted to the processes of European construction and economic globalization. The notion of borders is fading away and giving rise of the old notion of lines or fronts and regions, (NAFTA, Schengenland ) and the concept of security must be adapted accordingly to take account of these changes. The transnationalisation of security opposes national (and societal) security. It creates, as in a Möbius ribbon, a situation where one never knows whether one is inside or outside (Bigo 1999, Walker 1993). This relation of inside and outside is central and more important than the need to distinguish between state and societal security (Waever et al. 1993). The process of securitisation is not only enlarging towards identity, it involves a more profound move. Internal and external security are merging and de-differentiating after a period of strong differentiation where the two worlds of policing and war had little in common (Bayley 1975). Now, especially after the end of bipolarity, external security agencies (the army, the secret service) are looking inside the borders in search of an enemy from outside. They analyse transversal threats (supposedly coming from immigrant, second generation of citizens of foreign origin, people from some inner cities or from the populous and disadvantaged suburbs). Internal security agencies (national police forces, police with military status, border guards, customs) are looking to find their internal enemies beyond the borders and speak of networks of crime (migrants, asylum seekers, diasporas, Islamic people who supposedly have links with crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, transnational organised crime). This so-called convergence towards new 320

2 threats and risks is considered the main justification for new structures and more cooperation between the agencies (internal as well as external) as well as a rationalizing of their budgets in a period of financial crisis for security affairs. The core of this new securitization is related to transnational flows and to the surveillance of boundaries (physical, social, and of identity), and can be seen as attempts to re-draw a border between an inside and an outside, a border different from the state frontiers. Beyond the borders: policing today Discussing the move of internal security agencies beyond their borders, numerous works have described the transformation affecting the national police forces of all Member States of the EU, even if we have fewer treatments concerning customs and police with military status (Anderson and Den Boer 1994; Anderson and Den Boer et al. 1996; Bayley 1985; Bigo 1992; Brogden 1990; Busch 1991; Fijnaut and Hermans 1991; Mawby 1990; Nayer et al. 1995; Reiner 1992; Van Outrive et al 1996). They have highlighted how the Europeanisation process interferes with purely national logics and invalidates analyses of internal security as an isolated phenomenon. The international is now both a constitutive and explicative dimension of internal security and police work, even if intellectual traditions and academic separation between internal and external tend to make one forget this. These works have shown that within the European area, national police forces from the different countries are driven toward closer collaboration and exchanges of knowledge. This is particularly the case for special police forces (against drug trafficking, organised crime, terrorism, hooliganism and illegal immigration). Information exchange (Interpol, Schengen Information System, Europol) has intensified, and new technologies (computers, telesurveillance) as well as new administrative personnel (liaison officers, officials from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, security attachés within the embassies) have been set up in parallel with an exacerbated development of private activities in what has become an internal security market (Milipol). Poles of European groupings such as Schengen, Trevi - then the Third pillar of Maastricht, or Europol have emerged. In these areas of high policing, police work is not carried out simply at local or national level, but on a European or even international scale. This wider scope of internal security goes beyond the frontiers of the State and obliges a change in the notion of sovereignty (at the intellectual and constitutional 321

3 levels). Internal security will include undertaking activities such as surveillance of clandestine immigration, surveillance of cultural, religious and social influences from the country of origin of migrants and even on their offspring, surveillance and maintenance of order in so called problem districts, and control of transborder flows. The maintenance and restoration of order without opening fire, even in situations involving hostile foreign populations, are also connected to the first activities: they use almost identical knowledge, but in different contexts. Some French policemen or gendarmes explain that their knowledge gained in African riots or even in Sarajevo is relevant to the management of the riots in French suburbs. This crossing of the borders is not only territorial. The connection is also about identity: not the minority versus majority, but cross border activities and transboundary problems, including that of transgressing boundaries of identity with mixed marriage. Internal security thus implies collaboration with foreign countries and dissatisfaction with clear lines or borders between inside and outside, state and society, sovereignty and identity. Internal security activities block the possibility of distinguishing between an outside, state, sovereign security and an inside, societal, identity security. They are always entrenched and cannot be isolated from foreign policy or considered simply as the protection of national territory against internal threats by using national means. Internal security is not an internal problem between communities in a public sphere about the definition of national identity, internal security is a transversal vision of some knowledge about public order and surveillance inside or outside the territory, associated with specific devices of control. Convergence towards the same enemy? If internal security is not only from the inside, if it goes beyond the border, if it is transversal, is it because of the change in the nature of the threats? Is the inside adversary coming from outside? It could be an explanation and the transformation of violence in the last decades are an incentive for the de-differentiation of security, but it is not as a direct answer to violence that security is changing. It is through this connection between the devices of control and the management of fear and unease that links are made between military and police forces. The enlargement of the concept of internal security now links these two different universes. Military forces want to be in charge of the surveillance of the borders and to look for infiltrating enemies. 322

4 Although the street corner criminal and the soviet enemy used to belong to two separate worlds, the idea that police officers, customs officers, gendarmes, intelligence agencies and the army, all share the same enemies (terrorists and the countries that support them, organized crime and drugs trafficking, corruption and Mafiosi, the risk of urban riots of an ethnic nature and their implications for international politics with the immigration countries) is gaining more and more support inside different agencies. A common list of threats is being drawn up. A field of struggle and domination is emerging, as well as interests in cooperation. This field reacts on the socialisation of the agents and they act themselves as if a new situation constrains them to act now in a different way. So, security, and in particular internal security, must be understood as a process of securitisation/insecuritisation of the borders, of the identities and of the conception of orders. Securitisation is, in this sense, not an answer to insecuritisation, but a capacity to manage (and create) insecurity. When securitisation enlarges, so insecuritisation enlarges also, as metaphorically, it is the envelope of the sphere of security. More than that, sometimes security creates unwanted side effects towards other groups of people and as well as one having a security dilemma at the external and state level, one has a security dilemma at the internal and the community level. This dilemma creates insecuritisation due to self-fulfilling prophecy of security discourses, for example between migrants and border police, or between citizens of foreign origins and policemen controlling the suburbs. Internal (in)security must be analysed in connection with institutional knowledge and knowledge of the agencies, their devices and practices, including their discursive practices, as these are determinant factors in understanding how definitions of those who provoke fear, the adversary and the enemy are socially constructed. We need to understand the social construction of fears. And why they are now converging towards the figure of the migrant, as the key point inside a continuum of threats. In order to analyse the above phenomenon, it is possible to speak of a field of security where the different security agencies (police, gendarmeries, custom officers, army and information services, private security agencies and more marginally local security agencies, pro and anti-immigration agencies) participate de facto in the global redefinition of their respective attributions. This hypothesis of a security field where the border between internal and external security can hardly be detected (like on a Möbius ribbon), has the advantage of linking what is too often disconnected: namely defence 323

5 studies and studies on police. Such an approach enables one to understand that internal security extends beyond organisational questions of territorial defence on which the agencies focus. Consideration of internal security questions calls us to think about security issues in general, the relations between the State and individual as well as the relation to democracy in the contemporary age. They require us to retrace the structural evolutions and emergence of a risk society, which transforms the actual conception of security. They lead to questions beyond security needs, concerning not only the interests of social groups pushing for securitisation but also collective behaviour and cultural norms which form the framework of what we will call security and internal security in a given society. It needs to take into consideration who are the producers of the social construction of threats and how these fears are connected with (in)securitisation. So, even if we agree with some of the descriptions concerning the convergence of threats, they need to be analysed as a social construct which is not independent from the security agencies and whose legitimacy to declare the truth of the threats needs to be put in question. Such an analysis implies the articulation between a foucaldian approach and Pierre Bourdieu s theory of field. The methodology which underpins this research is discussed in two other articles (Bigo forthcoming). Here I want only to illustrate what could be the transformation of this epistemological stance into specific research concerning the merging of the internal and external security. I want to explain why, at some points, the two dimensions of security become one. The framing of the security question It is difficult to find an article on societal security or about the enlargement of the scope of security which avoids a lengthy description of the transformation of threats, and which assesses that the government s reaction to these new dangers. Some demand global solutions and military involvements. Others refuse this militarisation of security and demand more police activities. Others want more prevention and less coercive measures to struggle against the threats. But they all agree that the threats come from the social world and that a government has the responsability to answer them. The notion of the survival of states, nations, collective identities continues to be at the core of these descriptions. But despite their claim to neutrality, these descriptions, are embedded with moral judgements, with préjugés concerning the legitimacy of fighting 324

6 against crime, the Mafias, the terrorists, or the Europeanisation, the cosmopolitanism.... They claim that, so long as they are well balanced between right and left, they have some truth. Have they? At the political level, for different governments, the legitimacy of reacting acts as a purification ritual where everything is legitimate against these new threats where exceptional measures are normal in front of such dangers. The lines between security and liberty blur. Liberty is not the limit of security but the condition of security, so security has no limits. Security is unlimited (Waever 1997). Security needs to be global. At that point, governments want to take account of all the different security agencies and to co-ordinate their activities without creating the problem of duplication of tasks which would disrupt their normal operation and raise the budget. Politicians at the national, European and sometimes western level want to say that they can answer these new threats. They ask for advice and many academics want to be councillors to the Prince. Notions circulate between political labellisation, administrative registrations and academic conceptualisations. Academics want to propose new definitions and new solutions for security, but often they begin with statistics coming from political labels or registrations of bureaucracies and they forget this point. So, they analyse security as a by-product of fears which come from society and which are legitimate even if they are without substances, because they are registered by state authorities. Discussions about the fear of crime or feelings of insecurity are good examples of this problem. Thus, a large number of academics are trying to help the government find an answer to a problem without recognising that they are framing some events as a political or security problem, and have part of the responsibility for how security problems become framed not of the events but of the aggregation of different events under the same category. Politicians and agencies uncertainty about where to draw the boundaries of security issues has had a marked influence on the way works on international relations were undertaken, if only as a result of the role of foundations and the financial structure of social science research programs. Some studies claim to be direct operational responses and flood institutions with contradictory recommendations explaining why NATO or the UN should or should not intervene to re-establish law and order, or why French or American soldiers should or should not intervene in urban riots. The available military and police means to combat the risk of migration are discussed without stopping a moment, just to think about the legitimacy of such a question. Other studies 325

7 avoid being so directly influenced by the interests of the different agencies and propose new concepts, but the knowledge stakes cannot be analysed independently from the power stakes. The redefining of security questions is not just a simple point of learning within the small world of internationalists. Disregard of this rule in the social game in favour of an idealistic epistemology sometimes leads international relations scholars to discuss the relationship between security, borders and identity as if they were pure concepts and as though their symbolic power were not drawn from the existence of institutions, which moreover are the same institutions that manage the government s claim to a monopoly on legitimate physical violence. The articulation of relations of knowledge, ranking and limits between concepts is thus also the articulation of the power struggle between the security agencies, a relation with the truth on what security means. To overcome the idealisation of security, the essentialisation of a meaning of security, one of the best approaches seems to be to analyse security as a device, as a technique of government - to use a foucaldian framework. But security does not emerge from everywhere, it is connected with special agents, with professionals (military agencies, secret services, customs, police forces). And it is only if we follow in detail how they manage to control people, to put them under surveillance, that we will understand how they frame security discourses. If we refuse to do this sociological work, if we try only to analyse the inter-discursive practices (which has the advantage of leaving the researcher alone, far from these bad guys ), we will intellectualise the securitisation in a way that is correlated with the habitus of the researcher which does not fit with the habitus and practices of the security agencies. To analyse these processes fully requires spending time with the people of the agencies, understanding how and why they use these techniques, and their legitimation of the routines of coercion, control and surveillance. Analysing securisation/insecurisation practices Too often, analyses of security are far too inattentive to the social practices of security professionals. In many cases they are the product of secondary rationalisations which reduce security or identity to natural objects. These are discussed as if they were things. There is an attempt to define security or identity by reifying their objectifications as natural objects. As Paul Veyne puts it: 326

8 We are taking the spot that a projectile is going to land of its own accord as an intentionally aimed target. We apply a philosophy of the object as end or cause rather than a philosophy of relation which approaches the problem not from both ends, but from the middle, from practice or discourse. (Veyne 1971:97) The evolution of security and its various forms throughout history is explained either as an anthropological need (ontological security or security desire), as a legitimate demand from citizens (safety), or as a speech act which varies according to the moment (security discourses), rather than analysing the practices of securisation/insecurisation and the set up of the social power balance that enables them to be applied. This neglect of practices, of the actions of security agents, is a result of an inversion that would have us believe that what is done determines the doing, when in fact the opposite is true. The illusion of a natural object (the governed throughout history [or societal security]) conceals the heterogeneous nature of practices. The governed are neither one nor a multiple, any more than repression is, for the simple reason that it does not exist: there are just multiple objectifications which are correlative to heterogeneous practices. The relationship of this multiplicity of practices to a unit only becomes an issue if one tries to ascribe a unity that they do not have ; a gold watch, lemon zest and a racoon are also a multiplicity and do not seem to suffer from the fact that they do not have either origin, object or principle in common. Only the illusion of a natural object creates a vague impression of unity...there is no subconscious, no repression.. just the eternal teleological illusion and we are wrong to imagine that the doing, or practice, can be explained based on what is done, as on the contrary, what is done is explained by what the doing was at any point in history. Things, objects, are simply the correlate of practices. (ibid.: 99) Thus we should not reflect on the right definition of security and the diverse forms that it takes according to the sectors, but on the securisation/insecurisation practices which run through the internal sphere as much as the external sphere. We need to analyse the 327

9 heterogeneity of practices and we should remember that practices are interspersed with empty spaces, that they are few and far between and that objectifications fill the space by updating the potential left in the hollow. If the neighbouring practices change, if the limits move, then practice will update the new potentials and it will no longer be the same. A genealogy of practices is necessary. And we need to ask in each case: what exactly are the practices of coercion, of protection, of pacification, of fixed guard, of control, of surveillance, of information gathering and sorting, of information management, of covering areas, of calming, of dissuasion, of locking up, of turning back, of removal from the territory, all techniques which are used by security agents, and through what technology? Each has its own repertoire of actions, its own knowledge, its own technology. Practices are heterogeneous and dispersed, but are they not the response to political rationality? And if so, how should we envisage that rationality? As François Ewald points out, either it is examined from the point of view of the practices that it orders or forbids, of the way in which it problematises its objects, and it is a programmatic rationality, or it is examined as a diagram rationality by looking at the practices and trying to identify what the plan for their set up, what the ideal of their adapted function, may have been. (1996: 17) This diagram rationality crosses the whole of society and can be found in the most basic representation of immigrants. Nevertheless, it originates in the practices of security professionals and we can certainly evoke the field that these security professionals constitute, one of whose aims it is to manage and control life through concrete organizations such as schools, hospitals, the police and the army. Delimiting the problem of internal security - the perspective of security agencies Security on an internal level: from police to internal security Security is no longer an issue which can be solely assimilated with the collective security of a state, it also, and increasingly so, concerns the individual security of each 328

10 one of us - whether the individual is threatened by criminal acts or from attacks from abroad. The contemporary state is no longer only held responsible for assuring the institutional survival of the collectivity, it must also guarantee the personal survival of each of its constitutive members, regardless of where they are. An attack which occurs thousands of kilometres away from the national territory, but which involves French citizens will be considered as an unacceptable threat to security. It s the same concern that is expressed when as stating that too many people voluntarily use drugs and endanger their lives. Similarly, concern is expressed with regard to religious conversions (Islam, for fear of radical proselytism; sects for health reasons). The semisettled foreigner, even when he has citizenship, is suspected of disrespecting the host society s norms and of disturbing the notion of public space. The State thus wants to take charge of individual security and widen the notion of public order. It aims to realise the truth programme, that it has been trying to assert for a long time with contract theories, but lacked the means to carry out. Control and surveillance technologies and new knowledge in the social sciences reinforce this push towards maximising security, to implement a body politics, to have a life policy where the production of life is more important for the government than the right to deliver death. At the same time, the practical realisation of such a truth programme involves an ever increasing delegation of responsibilities to the private commercial sphere. This gives rise to important contradictions. The illusion of mastering life disappears under the pressure of commercial and capitalist approaches. Class logic is resurfacing and the private sector tends to objectify security through selling goods and advice about the good and secure life. So, the state has perhaps less impact than ever about the social practices of securitisation even if those responsible say the contrary. They are more and more interdependent with social and commercial interactions. They cannot escape this privatisation of security issues and they cannot continue to distinguish between state and non-state security. This change in attitude of the state, the will to master individual security, must not of course be exaggerated. It has been a slow metamorphosis during which the citizens points of view have been gradually taken into consideration. It is the progress of democratization and state making that has taken place over centuries (Bayley 1975; Elias 1993; Lacroix 1985). We will not develop here - as it is not the aim of the paperhow the state progressively affirmed its claim to assuring and gained an effective monopoly over crime control in its territory, nor will we expose how this latter function 329

11 has been increasingly contested as the state has acquired the means to control the coming and goings over its borders, the movement of people within its territory, and delinquent populations (Foucault 1975; Reiner 1992; Tilly 1990). Possible illegalities have indeed been reduced through the multiplication of laws, legislative and administrative networking, control technologies (identity cards, passports) (Noiriel 1991; Torpey 1996) and although they have always been taken care of, it has not been without provoking near revolts and, in each instance, installing great fear in the leaders (vagabonds, anarchists, working class as dangerous class, lumpenproletariat, longhaired youths, and now youths from the ghettos) (Cesari 1997; Delumeau 1989; Duhamel 1993; Rey 1996). By reinforcing surveillance over a specific group, the state has been able to consolidate its hold over territory and guarantee the security of other strata of the population, but at the same moment securisation has created insecurisation, fears and the myth that the full implementation of the public order, of tranquillity, of the peace of the public space is always endangered by revolts, or even by hunger strikes of the people excluded or under surveillance. So, as Norbert Elias has pointed out, the pacification of customs and the reduction in murderous crime over a long period, in parallel with the strengthening of both selfconstraint and state power have not diminished the feeling of insecurity. The immense fear of losing one s life and soul (in the course of one s travels) while travelling the highways and byways has instead been replaced by the multiplication of trivial fears concerning one s property (Elias 1993). The population could all the more easily change their concerns with regard to security because the essential was no longer endangered. It is only in times of social peace that we feel threatened by uncivil actions of our neighbours (Roché 1993). The feeling of insecurity experienced by the individual is always relative to and conditioned by a particular context of global security. The role of the police and the discourse on their role has evolved and become more complex. The massive transformations of the construction of the parliamentary State and its legitimation have been followed by the progressive demilitarisation of the police. The state police also wanted to be society s police. Intelligence is but one of the tasks of the police, whose functions also include providing emergency aid, crime control, assuring public order i.e. peace. The police organisation brings together very diverse professions and duties (Berliere 1991; Buisson 1949; Buttner 1987). With the development of a parliamentary system, the state learned to look after its populations 330

12 and no longer to treat them as enemies, even during uprisings (, Rabinow 1991; Veyne 1971). The individual s security has become an increasingly important issue and the populations expectations in this area have been reinforced to the present point where public organisations fall far short of being able to satisfy the massive demands for security. The privatisation of security was created by the will of the state to implement its own program. The focus on identity, on personal security, falls into the private sector. Politicians try to disengage themselves from individual security but too many links were created between public administrations and private agencies (recruitment, money, personal links with politicians). This short genealogy enables us to reposition what is at stake in internal security (cahiers de la sécurité intérieure no. 3 and 24). For centuries crime has been treated in an ordinary way without major implications for politicians. Even if the latter were aware of threats of revolutionary subversion, they were not concerned with individual security. Now, however, police issues have become political issues in the sense that they incite public debate (Edelman 1964). If one were to exaggerate somewhat one could say that whereas before police only had to do their work and the state had only to provide them with the means for doing so, now governers are asked for explanations: explanations concerning both crime and police (Robert and Sack 1985). With regard to this change James Rosenau (1990) speaks of a transformation in the allegiance system and an obligation on the part of the state to get results in security matters whereas before the state was obeyed and no one questioned its competence. The widening of internal security is due to the fact that the security of individuals, their personal feeling of insecurity and the link between this type of security and collective security has progressively been taken into account via security of citizens and society and no longer via the state and national security. This heavy structural tendency towards management of individual security and taking care of the individual by way of all conduits of the state: societal security, civilian security, road security is part of the development that François Ewald has termed an insurance society (société assurantielle) where risks are minimised. Numerous liberal thinkers have quite wrongly viewed this phenomenon as a suffocation of individuals by the state. On the contrary, individualisation only becomes possible when a state exerts its control in this domain. The two phenomena - individualisation and state control - are in fact two different side of the same process. For a long time individual security was considered in terms of a given territory delimited by state borders. This was the scope of the state s responsibility. Beyond 331

13 national boundaries, one could only rely on other states (Chapus 1997). Now the security of nationals abroad has become a constant concern for western nations. Numerous military operations have been carried out in the name of such a priority, even if this were to conceal other priorities. One evoked a secret return to a canon policy, or inversely the humanitarian dimension alone was stressed, or otherwise one spoke of an appeal for imperial intervention (Rufin 1996; Salame 1996). However, it seems that what was at stake in all cases was above all a transplantation of internal security operations to foreign territory (Cultures et Conflits 1993:11). The techniques used in these operations transformed them into international police operations for maintenance of order, and not armed conflicts. The mobilisable knowledge in conjunction with this vision of things was often poorly understood by public opinion and the media. International mobility, movement of populations, especially tourists, has rendered one s relationship with the territory more complex. The notion of citizenship has supplanted a purely territorial logic. Security can no longer be conceived as protection behind state borders: borders that they have tried to make as impermeable as possible. Although numerous texts uphold this vision of a fortified castle or a fortress nation or Europe, it is undeniable that the security of individuals has become deterritorialised. It now depends on networks, agreements between countries and security agencies and private insurance mechanisms. (Bigo 1996a). What are the present consequences of such social global transformations? The notions of internal security, individual security and the security of citizens have become politically important issues, surpassing in this respect police and crime issues. There has been a tendency towards assimilating the police with the public service, despite resistance from those with monarchic views. Police issues have been politicised by placing them under the banner of internal security in the sense that what was before a little police matter is becoming an important stake in political struggles, especially as it seems to be a decisive factor in determining undecided votes, particularly at the local level. The politicisation of internal security issues has gone through cycles of secrecy and public exposure. There is nothing radically new about that. But, what concerns us, one could say that it was in the 1980s and 1990s that questions about police become the subject of public debate, at the same time as discourses on urban insecurity and the city on the one hand, and discourses about stopping immigration of salaried manual workers, on the other, appeared (Ackerman et al.1983). 332

14 It is in fact possible to consider that the real turning point was when questions about urban insecurity became important (in the mid 70's, first in the USA and Canada, then in Great Britain and Germany and after in the beginning of the 80s in Italy and France). At that time, these questions were approached from the angles of destructuration of citizen identity, anomie, loss of values, and geographical and social exclusion. Confidence in the city and civilisation had been lost. A declinist discourse had emerged. In connection with the latter there was a progressive transition between discourses on the working class (a loss of meaning in the workers movement, a loss of coherence), the role of immigrants (different values and religions) and a discourse on problem districts (inner cities or suburbs) as well as delinquency (the informal drug economy). The existence of extremist parties with anti-immigration rhetoric and their relative electoral success in certain countries reinforced the belief that public opinion was largely security orientated and sensitive to arguments for a greater use of coercion. Politicians were quick to ethnicise the urban problem and numerous discourses revolved around the merits and drawbacks of multiculturalism. The mid 1980s saw the increase in political violence by clandestine organisations on European soil. This, in conjunction with the Iranian Revolution and the Middle East situation, served to reinforce this climate of anxiety and turn the focus not towards all immigrants, but on those coming from Islamic countries swept up in the wave of re-islamisation, or countries in the middle of civil war. Islam, especially when it reached the Maghreb, was seen as a direct threat not only for these countries but for Europe too, and particularly for France. A durable connection had been made. There is no doubt that politicians fears concerning political violence of Islamic radicalism, discourses on urban insecurity and the transformation of migration flows, play a decisive role in the progressive politicisation of crime, insecurity and immigration. Internal security emerged at the time when economic and social questions started being approached from a security and cultural angle and when this latter perspective became important in determining institutional replies to these questions. There emerges a dialectical tension between internal security and national territory: as the latter appears to define the scope of so called internal security, the security agencies themselves are more concerned with what is going on beyond the national territory. They are more interested in security beyond the border than in focusing on identity inside the border, on multiculturalism problems. Local and practical problems are now under privatisation and they move from that to transversal security. Politisation 333

15 and public debate, consideration of individuals feelings of insecurity, the connection between territorial protection and border crossing, the necessary collaboration with foreign countries: put together all these points form a polyhedron through which internal security is rendered intelligible (polyèdre d intelligibilité, quoted by Foucault in Dits et Ecrits (1994:vol.II). Internal security thus implies, inconsistent with the traditional activities of the national police, a widening of the geographical sphere of activities. In other articles and books lengthy descriptions have been given as to why the establishment of a common enemy enabled the idea of police collaboration, how the CIPC and then Interpol developed, and why it was that Europe, first on an informal basis in the 1970s and then formally in the 1980s, was chosen as the platform for negotiation between police of the EU countries. It is crucial to understand that internal security cannot be reduced to the national territory. As it has been shown in both debates and actual practice (including the formulation of legislative norms), internal security has developed on a European scale. The number of countries participating in these forums has increased - the Nordic countries including Norway and Iceland have joined and the central and eastern European countries and even Russia are interested; USA and Canada have a role in these forums as does Switzerland - to the point of diluting the notion of Europe. Judicial norms have been constituted (Articles K1-K9 of the Maastricht treaty, recommendations from JAI Council, Conventions including Europol, the Amsterdam treaty which places further constraints on national governments, the Schengen requirements). The sphere of security activities has extended to include migration flows and transfrontier flows. Europeanisation had the effect of allowing a logic of confidentiality to come to the forefront. It meant that administrations and experts from each country had to confront each other, but it also allowed them to avoid dialogues with other sectors in their own society. Not only were associations excluded from the game, but so were local actors and parliamentarians. Even local police were progressively marginalised and replaced by European specialists. The technicality of the matter served to justify their absence from the debate. Paradoxically, Europeanisation thus served to reinforce the tendency towards secrecy and confidential reports. This was all the more so because the procedures that were chosen excluded the Commission from playing its role. There are endless examples. All these phenomena prove that internal security is a way of labelling the transformation of professional practices and not simply an ideological discourse. 334

16 I have shown elsewhere (Bigo 1996a) that police forces are not to simply responding to the developments in crime; as crime is now organized at European or international level, it is not a kind of functional spill over that has now reached police functions. We have analysed the semi-autonomy of the security agencies by highlighting the transformations within the world of security without regarding these transformations as a pure reflection of and reaction to the evolution in violence and crime. We have shown that it would be inconsistent not to analyse these developments in violence, but that the main point lies in the way that the social structure of the threat induces the police not only to rise to these threats but also to take part in their definition. These games of defining what is and what is not threatening can mostly be explained away by inter-agency rivalry and by the politicization of matters of public security. Thus, to sum up, it could be said that internal security has experienced a double widening process. It extends beyond the national territory and is directly linked to European and international issues. In no instance is it autonomous and independent from the collaboration of security agencies (police, customs, gendarmerie) on an international scale. On the contrary, its existence is almost wholly dependent upon such collaboration. This widening of the network of contacts which the agencies judge as necessary to combat terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime raises the questions of levels of trust and confidentiality as well as that of the autonomy of an internal security (and immigration) policy of each EU state with respect to the whole of Europe. We will return to this later. Internal security is also connected with the emergence or not of a feeling of European citizenship which overflows national frontiers, and reactions from different social groups with respect to practical consequences of European citizenship on national life. If internal security extends beyond the national territory, we have insisted that it also extends beyond the usual activities of the police and gendarmerie. The connections which are made between terrorism, drugs, crime, delinquency, border surveillance, fighting against major drug trafficking, and controlling clandestine immigration widen the spectrum of public security towards different activities: information and military activities to fight against clandestine organisations coming from abroad (from a government, community or diaspora) who use political violence against citizens or use the national territory as a transit site or for sale of drugs, and have an effect on the usual activities of custom officers (border controls, the fight against drug trafficking, economic intelligence) who find themselves drawn into internal security, surveillance activities which are increasingly delegated to 335

17 private operators on a local scale. The connection is stronger when the different agencies use the same technologies and knowledge (fingerprints, unforgeable ID, computerised tracking of entrance, residence, accommodation and exit, setting up expert IT systems, satellite surveillance, widespread data-stocking). Policing is now carried out using networks: networks of administrative bodies in which customs officers, immigration offices, consulates and even private transport companies and private security companies join forces with the national police forces and gendarmes; networks of information technology with the creation of national or European data files on wanted or missing persons, on those who have been denied residence, expelled, turned back at the frontier or refused asylum (FNE file on foreigners, FPR file on wanted persons, OFPRA -files on refugees, SIS Schengen file, Interpol and Europol files); networks of liaison officers that have been sent abroad to represent their governments and enable information exchange; networks of semantics in which new doctrines and new concepts on conflict and political violence are developed. Remote policing is ever more frequent with work outside the national territory and the help of technology. Security checks are no longer necessarily done at the border on a systematic and egalitarian basis, but can be carried out further downstream, within the territory, within the border zone or even upstream with police collaboration in the home country of the immigrants, through visa-granting systems and through readmission agreements. There is a change in the categories of police action (from national police forces controlling national crime to internal European security, tracking world-wide organized crime, migration flows and refugee movements), a change in security-check targets (from the control of and hunt for individual criminals to the policing of foreigners or to the surveillance of so-called risk groups that have been defined using criminology and statistics that, according to circumstances, bring them to focus on extra-community immigration and those diaspora that are the origin of the most frequent and most serious of threats to security), an alteration in the time frame of security-checks (from systematic, generally slow intermittent checks to virtually permanent surveillance that focuses on a few target groups and reacts with maximum rapidity). Thus systematic control of the territory has been marginalised, although it still exists, in comparison to the surveillance of certain populations. New practices are emerging. New posts such as liaison officers and police attachés in embassies are being created. A result of these new forms of control is that face to face relations are decreasing in favour of a proactive mentality where one tries to determine which populations are likely to commit an 336

18 infraction before they even do so. These methods are applied to crime as much as to immigration. Target categories are identified through the statistical analysis of information produced by the networks, and they become the object of increased surveillance. The idea is to anticipate the flows and movements of particular groups rather than to follow individuals after the fact. This is done by morphing, where a scenario is reconstructed from just a few fragments. The very term policing loses its sense when it is widened outside crime control to such an extent (Bigo 1996a). Indeed, the term internal security takes into account this extension of police activities to cover a wide variety of fears and insecurities. This widening of internal security leads to its interpenetration with external security which is itself undergoing complete change and restructuring due to the questioning of realists and neo-realists theses on security (associated with Defence) and the emergence of a transnational view of security. It is becoming difficult to differentiate between internal and external security and divide them into distinct sectors. The Vigipirate plan against terrorism in France is one example of the ambiguous relationship between Ministries of internal and external affairs. They are both in fact merging so as to end up constituting the one and same security field. Security in the external arena: from defence to internal security The military no longer know what their duties are. Honour and sacrifice associated with death in combat are exaggerated by some who fear that these values will become folklore and are condemned to disappear. The socialisation of the soldier s profession and learning about the licence to kill have been replaced by a muscled maintenance of peace. The rules of engaging in combat have been modified. In certain extreme conditions, soldiers in their role of surveillance become targets for the enemy (blue and white helmets) and do not have the authorisation to engage in fire. This provokes much questioning which is only partially masked by political obedience and discipline. So far, studies on humanitarian interventions have been more focused on motivations and legitimacy than on the practical knowledge that is mobilised. Should one send the military or the gendarmerie to carry out these operations? What should be thought of the establishment of Civil Affairs to accompany certain so-called humanitarian peacerestoring operations? What should the military be used for? As politicians see it, war is indeed an external projection but this justification alone calls upon the global legitimacy of the army. The military are returning to the national 337

19 territory and emphasising the role of protection. The military are thus returning to the interior at a time when war beyond national borders has become a rare occurrence. If war and the state, war making and state making, have been closely linked in the history of European state formation, if the army has defended the collective security of the group from aggression by other groups or communities, enabling the distinction to be drawn between combatants and non-combatants, the front and behind the front, if behaviour was for a long time determined by the protecting function of borders, now we question the role of war and predict the end of the military order. If all threats stemmed from the Soviet enemy, did its disappearance mean that we were then moving towards global peace and the end of conflicts? If this was the case, another painful question arose: what should be done with the military, with defence industries? What was to become of defence after the Soviet enemy had disappeared? Without taking the same view of numerous NGOs that were demanding peace dividends, governments took advantage of this wave of ideas to cut spending during a period of economic and financial crisis. Entire sectors of activity are being questioned. Arms and research programs are being cancelled. In some countries the format of the army is being altered. In France it is being made professional, despite the long tradition of a citizen s army. Defence industries have been caught unprepared and in certain countries reconversion programs using high technology for border surveillance and immigration control have been developed. An additional link has been woven between internal and external security. Economic and financial interests have emerged inciting translation of the spectrum of threats and the rediscovery of local conflicts and their socalled damaging effects. By the mid 1990s a sort of global configuration of convergent representations had emerged which joined internal and external security, integrating the former into the latter. Crime, borders, immigration, threat to national identity and the ideology of the Fifth Column became inextricably intermingled and were taken up again in a matrix which owes practically everything to defence research in which the habits of the actors had been formed. The potential power of terrorist activities and their effectiveness against democracies have largely been overestimated, as this enable a link to be made between exotic conflicts and national territory. In the same step a link has been established between terrorism, drugs, organised crime and immigration through the terms grey zone and urban savages. The recent debates on the threat from the South and the clash of civilisations have shown exactly how these shifts in positions have come 338

20 about and why, trapped as they are between the hammer of the benefits of peace and the anvil of the threat from the South, those who never really believed in this threat but have budgets and interests to defend have adopted a standpoint in which terrorists and Mafia groups are their new enemies. The end of military rule referred to by Maurice Bertrand (1996) implies reconversions that are not simply of equipment. The strategisation of the threats to internal security is self-justifying. This strategisation has some practical consequences. It more or less redefines the tasks allotted to the different services. The Italian Minister for Defence points to Islamism as the threat that replaces the threat of communism and proposes the use of the army in immigration control. In Germany, Helmut Kohl considers the PKK an exclusively terrorist party and a threat to national security. In France, the bomb attacks of 1995 relaunched the surveillance of all immigrant associations and the strengthening of legislation concerning not only terrorism but immigration and political asylum. Apart from Islamism considered as subversive terrorism, all countries talk of a grey zone, of global Mafia organisations and of changing forms of criminality (Raufer 1993). Intelligence services turned towards counter-espionage have found new missions with the infiltration of Mafia networks and economic intelligence but still use the same procedures. On the other hand, the vision in terms of an external projection of humanitarian operations has concealed the meaning of missions carried out and cleared questions of projection from internal security, whereas they should undoubtedly be linked. Thus an important link between internal and external security has been neglected, because it functioned in the other direction and brought military activities closer to police activities. Thus far from being an extension as some rhetorics argue, external security is in full retraction or at least, redeployment. In certain countries, the army format has been transformed. Everywhere budgets are cut. This situation is very different from ten years ago. This change in such a short time frame has destabilised the most deep-set beliefs. As war has been replaced by international police operations, operation for restoring peace, which mobilises a different knowledge, the military find themselves in situations of international collaboration where they have to take care of restoring peace, in the same way as police and gendarmes. Consequently, they transfer internal security beyond the national borders. Should one then consider sending police and gendarmes instead of the military? Such chassé-croisés (mix-ups) whereby the military would operate internally and the police externally are destabilising. 339