ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the emergence of transnational policing patterns in the European Union (EU). General processes such as Europeanization and globalization have provided incentives for the evolution of transnational governance, as the editors also demonstrate in the introduction to this book. In turn, this is beginning to have a pervasive effect on the criminal justice arena, especially since terrorism has been framed as a transnational and networked threat that is in need of a global response. Transnational policing in the European Union has had the possibility to mature because member states compensate their resistance against the creation of supranational law enforcement agencies by being tolerant about other forms of cross-borderization which are less detrimental to national sovereignty. There are, however, continuous frictions between the call for more centralized coordination at national level and the pragmatic need to develop flexible cooperation practices at the decentralized level.
