ABSTRACT
Legal scholars, foreign office officials and humanitarian organizations were not the only forces shaping new trends in international law in the 20th century. Police officials also shaped international law by building new structures of domestic surveillance and information tracking, then later, under different conditions, sought to apply these models to other problems in the international arena. Specifically, Austria-Hungary in 1914 created a new system, the Defensive Kundschaftdienst (” defensive secret service” ) to track suspected spies and create decentralized ” reservoirs of data” that were shared among four central offices in the empire and transmitted to networks of sub-offices. After the First World War, the Viennese police proposed this bureaucratic model for the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), the predecessor of Interpol. This has been overlooked in the literature on Interpol, which has argued that the roots of the ICPC lie in European police cooperation to combat 19th century anarchism and limit counterfeiting and human trafficking before and after the First World War. The literature has also overly concentrated on Weberian explanations for this phenomenon, neglecting how the special concerns and fears of Habsburg police bureaucrats influenced this system.
