ABSTRACT
Policing is generally acknowledged to be a central function of sovereign nation-states. There are a number of operational and information-related police cooperation instruments, designed to prevent crime and to uphold the wider public order. This chapter provides the basis for an assessment of how the Norwegian police have turned out the way they have, the relevance of the changes to policing resulting from EU cooperation, and how these may impact the state and the Union in the future. As in France and Britain, since the 19th century, the Norwegian state administration system and the police force have been divided into various agencies with specialised functions. Sovereignty is one of the concepts in political philosophy and the political and legal sciences that has received most scholarly attention. Theories on the nation-state hold that the state derives its territorial rights from the prior collective right of a nation to that territory.
