Organized crime and the outline of a new structure of security in Europe
Authors: Fatic Aleksandar 
Published: October 2010

The modern security threats in Europe, and especially in the transitional region of Southeastern Europe, are considerably different from the traditional military threats arising from statehood-related aspirations of the minorities, or from unresolved border issues between neighbours, or between regional aspirations of the former superpowers. Today's security threats emanate primarily from organized crime and terrorism, two curses that have spread their realm across the globe, and that threaten to establish breeding grounds in Southeastern Europe, due to the relatively soft and porous borders, unresolved status of ethnic communities in neighbouring states, internal instability and weakness of the institutions in the region?s states, as well as contradictory and sometimes counterproductive signals that are sent to the region by the large international organizations and influential countries. A particular danger for the region arises from the newly developing "netted" structures of organized crime, which present organized criminal gangs not only as an alternative "industry" to various legitimate social services, an industry whose parts mutually compete, but increasingly as an aspiring government in itself, namely an industry whose parts cooperate, rather than competing, and which tend to reduce the level of competition and increase the level of cooperation across the region, thus threatening the very foundations of the state, and hijacking the state agenda by co-opting various state agencies and officials through corruption, intimidation, or manipulation into collusion. This paper briefly outlines the main currents of development of the structures and aspirations of organized criminal gangs in the region their changing roles in the region's societies, and the perspectives of their organized synergy with terrorist organizations occurring. It also discusses the most effective methods to address these problems and the conditions for their development and implementation in the region. Namely the paper espouses a central argument that aims to show that the logic of development of terrorism in Europe implies that, sooner or later, especially Islamic terrorist organizations will be faced with a very real dilemma of whether or not to establish systematic cooperation with organized crime. Such cooperation would offer tremendous operational advantages to terrorists, with logistics for terrorist actions being provided by organized crime, while at the same time terrorism could provide an umbrella of "political legitimation" through "service to the right cause" of those who see themselves as structurally oppressed, for the classic operations of organized crime. Such quasilegitimation is already commonplace in Latin America, where traders in poppy flower, who pass the produce on to enter the chain of production and trafficking of heroin to the western markets sometimes enjoy the status of those who care for the entire communities of poor, poppy-growing Latin American farmers. Similar structures of quasilegitimation could be established in areas populated mainly by Islamic inhabitants, should the international offensive led by the US against Islamic countries continue unabated, and synergies with organized crime could be used by the particularly "entrepreneurial" leaders of certain terrorist groups. The author warns against allowing such synergies to take place by the continuing aggression on the international front, which causes an increase in terrorism through the simple action and reaction mechanism.