Cooperation Among Security Agencies in the European Union: Europeanisation of Public Administrations in Just Another Variation?

Over the past decades, police and intelligence agencies have developed multiple forms of formal and informal cooperation in the European Union. This includes approaches varying from informal meetings and networks, Police and Customs Cooperation Centres in boarder regions, centralised databases and institutions such as the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol and CEPOL, the EU Agency of Law Enforcement and Training.

In parallel, the old doctrine claiming that the European Union is primarily a norm-setting institution, while administrative implementation is left to the member states, has been overhauled by a more complex empirical reality. Numerous variations of vertical and horizontal, coercive and voluntary coordination and cooperation among the member states’ administrations can be observed. Public administration, public policy and legal scholars have analysed this trend.

The paper that I propose for the conference explores how far cooperation among security agencies fits into the patterns of Europeanisation observed for other public administrations. The paper is based on the hypothesis that cooperation among security agencies fits into the patterns observed for other public administrations as long as the cooperation is predominantly related to bureaucratic issues, such as the transfer of evidence. However, secrecy and informality are supposed to be more important for cooperation among security agencies compared to cooperation between public administrations beyond the security field.