ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the legal, political and professional practices that helped define and transform the spaces of European and international criminal law. It also investigates one of the Cold War laboratories of internationalized criminal law thinking as scholars and practitioners built the conceptual frameworks that would diffuse into the political mainstream from the mid-1990s. The chapter analyzes how criminal law moved onto the political agenda in Europe, particularly in the closely linked context of German reunification and European Union federalism as promoted by specific Member States. It demonstrates how two new markets were created around regional and international innovations and how the professionals engaged in these markets became drivers in the expansion of criminal law to new social and political contexts. Criminal law was activated as a potential European and international governance technology in an atmosphere characterized by social and political restructuring. The specific political circumstances allowed for specific forms of governance mechanism to become politically viable.
