Policing Among Nations : Internationalizing the Monopoly of Force

International cooperation in the field of policing is linked to the definitional core of the state, the monopoly of the legitimate use of force (Max Weber). Whereas international cooperation in other fields has been widely analyzed, there is no systematic measure of the development and intensity of international police cooperation over time. The paper disaggregates the monopoly of force into three components (legitimation, methods and authorization) and analyzes how international police coop eration in Western Europe has developed since the 1960s and how strongly it impinges upon state sovereignty. Whereas in the 1960s, most international institutions in the field were only weak, the state monopoly of the legitimate use of force has been embedded, pooled or even delegated since the 1990s. Even in its core activity, the Western European state has become part of a multi-level system of governance