Book Reviews Hebenton, Bill and Terry Thomas. Policing Europe. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1995. Pp. 231. The process of European integration is examined in this book from both a descriptive and normative perspective. A political science phenomenology shows the historical development of the organization of police forces as a move along a continuum from centralization to decentralization. After a detailed analysis of the transformation of police organizations and the present policing arrangements in the single Member States, Hebenton and Thomas argue that there exists a widening gap between form and substance in the individuation of the dominant vehicle through which authority is exercised. From the formal point of view, the authors hold, state sovereignty still constitutes the normative concept for policing functions; from the substantial point of view, processes of disaggregation and fragmentation expose policing to an organizational bifurcation: on the one hand, a proliferation of decentralized and fragmented agencies at the local level and, on the other hand, a small number of centralized agencies at national and supranational levels. The authors put forward a strong claim in relation to the issue of immigration: what seems to be a process of unification from the perspective of European citizenship looks like a process of exclusion from the viewpoint of immigrants. In particular, the Schengen Convention is suspected of being in potential conflict with both international and European Community law. A realist perspective, according to the authors, shows that Schengen and the other intergovernmental EU structures have resulted in a dominant political agenda comprising immigration and asylum-seeker control policies. The book views the abolition of inner border controls between EU states as a factor generating a security deficit; it analyses data concerning transnational crime and argues that the new forms of supranational police work and cooperation emerged as a response to the increase in international criminal networks and the impact of migratory flows. The authors argue that the rapid developments in information technology have facilitated the growth and shape of the internal security field. More broadly, Policing Europe raises the question of a ‘transfer of illegitimacy’: in the area of internal security policing there might be, the authors argue, a positive encouragement to cede responsibility to a new centre. Finally Hebenton and Thomas make their normative claim and propose three ‘ideal-type’ alternative configurations for European policing arrangements: an integrated configuration, which links operational and policy matters at the institutional level; a pluralist configuration based on boundaries at the organizational level between police specializations and on the absence of clear hierarchical or strategic influences at the territorial level; and a mixed configuration combining, as with Europol, the coordinating functions between discrete national police forces and the centralizing function for operational information exchanges. Alberto Vespaziani Harvard Law School
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