Samenvatting

Cross-border police cooperation, in any case against political adversaries, has always been an important component in the foreign policy of European states, especially when police forces were established in their colonies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Against this background it was quite astonishing, because very artificial, that in the Maastricht Treaty a rather clear distinction was made between a second pillar (foreign and defense policy) and a third pillar (justice and home affairs, later on called police and judicial cooperation). Over the years this gap has been bridged from two sides: on the one side the geographical enlargement of the European Union into Central and Eastern Europe asked for the integration of police and judicial cooperation in the related policies vis-à-vis the (new) member states; on the other side the enlargement of the political and military role of the European Union on the international stage, reinforced by the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The proposal in the The Hague Program (2004) that it is necessary to develop a coherent strategy with regard to the ‘external’ aspects of the European Union policy in the area of freedom, security and justice, has led to the formulation of such a strategy by the member states. This strategy partly focuses on the containment of serious general problems like the containment of terrorism and organized crime and partly on the reinforcement of criminal justice systems in, respectively the strengthening of police and judicial cooperation with specific important third states. The Stockholm Program sticks to this format, but underlines the necessity to reinforce the coherence between the ‘external’ freedom, security and justice policy of the European Union and the police missions it organizes in a number of weak, failing or failed states.