EUROPEANIZATION OF CRIME: HOW MUCH OF A SOLUTION IS EUROPEAN FUNDING?

Radu-Tudor PETRE

Authors

Radu-Tudor PETRE PhD student at School for Advanced Studies of Romanian Academy (SCOSAAR), National Institute of Economic Research “Costin C. Kiritescu”, Romanian Academy

Keywords:

Europeanization of crime, social exclusion, cost of crime, innovation

Abstract

Justice and internal affairs are among the areas which benefited from the assistance provided by the European Union and other international donors both before and after Romania become one of member states. After the 1989, Romanian society witnessed an increase of crime and of costs associated with it, which raised concerns and placed crime control policies as top priority of foreign donor programmes. The European Union assistance in the field of justice and internal affairs focused on capacity building, achieving coherence and facilitating joint efforts in preventing and countering cross-border crime, through a robust support in ensuring material support and expertise transfer for Romanian judicial institutions. This was a response to Romanian priorities, but also to the Europeanization of crime – the spillover of crime and its associated costs within union territory. While in Romania there have not been systematic research to assess the impact of foreign assistance in the areas of justice and home affairs, law and order empirical project data indicate that possibly the main effect of the external aid has been to facilitate and speed up adoption of innovative means in crime control, as well as replacing state budget support in critical fields of judicial cooperation which were underperforming due to lack of funding. The European Union response to the Europeanization of crime through the means of ensuring funding and adequate resource allocation has been a late reaction to the crime spillover phenomenon and too weak to achieve significant results. This paper will analyze several elements of external assistance from the perspective of the response to Europeanization of crime, while proposing future research directions useful for evaluating the impact of such assistance.

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