Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in Central Europe, which operated from 1867 through October 1918, following the end of World War I. The union was a result of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, under which the House of Habsburg agreed to share power with the separate Hungarian government, dividing the territory of the former Austrian Empire between them. The realm comprised the actual states of Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, large parts of Serbia and Romania, and smaller parts of Italy, Montenegro, Poland, and Ukraine (Cornwall, 2002). The organizational beginnings of the police in the region under study in this book can be traced back to the period of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when the Gendarmerie was founded, as a legacy of Napoleon.

In Austria, the police today is still organized predominantly nationally, as Maximilian Edelbacher and Gilbert Norden in their chapter on Austria illustrate. The Federal Police is the main law enforcement agency of the country, and includes since 2005 the former Gendarmerie (which operated in rural areas), the former Security Guards (which operated in the cities), and the former Criminal Investigation Corps. The new organization has Provincial Directorates for Public Security, and next in the hierarchy there are District Police Commands and Federal Police Directorates in most of the larger cities of Austria. The local police forces are subordinated to the mayor of the municipalities.

In Hungary, after World War I and the nationalization of the local police forces, the Royal Hungarian State Police was founded in 1919–1920. After the World War II, the National Police Force was founded, erasing the historical heritage of Napoleon of the Gendarmerie, as Richard Leyrer points out in his chapter. After the Revolution, the police system was again reorganized and it kept its form until the political changes in 1989. In 1989, following the declaration of the Hungarian Republic, a new National Police was founded. Police departments operated in Budapest and in 19 counties. Since 1994, the police organization is regulated by a separate act which was accepted by the Parliament. The Police organization includes a central unit, county (metropolitan) police headquarters, police stations, and border police stations.

The Kingdom of Bohemia was gradually integrated into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as one of its three principal parts, alongside Austria and Hungary. In the nineteenth century the Czech lands became the industrial powerhouse of the monarchy and the core of the Republic of Czechoslovakia which was formed in 1918, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. After 1933, the country remained the only democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (Skilling, 1976). After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the consequent disillusion with the Western response, the Communist Party won the majority in the 1946 elections. Czechoslovakia became a communist-ruled state.

In 1968, the increasing dissatisfaction culminated in attempts to reform the communist regime. The Prague Spring of 1968, ended with an invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries. The troops remained in the country until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when the communist regime collapsed. Until 1989, policing was carried out by the National Police Forces of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into its constituent states, on the one hand, the Czech Republic, and on the other the Slovak Republic (Cabada & Waisova, 2012).

From 1 January 1993 on, police tasks in the new Czech Republic have been performed by the National Police of the Czech Republic. The authors, Pavel Foltin, Andrej Rohál, and Mária Šikolová, in their chapter point to the fact that the main activities of the police were managed without serious problems. Municipal police bodies came into existence, local security forces, voluntarily established by municipalities. In the meantime, the Czech Republic is considered having the highest human development in Central and Eastern Europe (Klugman, 2009). It is also ranked as the third most peaceful country in Europe and most democratic in the region. It is a pluralist multiparty parliamentary representative democracy, a member of the EU, of NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe.

Initially, the new Slovak Republic, on the other hand, experienced more difficulty than the Czech Republic in developing a modern market economy. Slovakia joined NATO and the EU in 2004. It is a member of the Schengen area and part of the European Monetary Union. Retšpís Josef, Gašpierik Libor, Boc Kamil, and Felcan Miroslav stress in their chapter the fact that the Police is subordinated to the minister of interior, and determines the content of their activities and the internal structure. The Police force is divided into different units: a criminal police, financial police, riot police, traffic police, objects protection, immigration police, customs police, special units, protection of particular people, and inspection services.

From the Russian Empire to the Russian Federation

The Russian Empire of the tsars stretched from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Pacific Ocean and was to a large extent separated from much of the rest of Europe. As Vladimir Sergevnin and Oleg Kovalev point out, the first police agency in Russia was already established in Saint Petersburg in 1718 by decree of Peter the Great. Russian feudal serfdom was abolished in 1861, but its abolition increased revolutionary pressures. In 1722 the Governing Senate established the Moscow Police. The first Investigative Department was founded in 1866, operating under the Police Department of the Ministry of Interior, and by 1907 similar departments were created in other major cities of the Russian Empire. Between the abolition of serfdom and the beginning of World War I in 1914, notable changes were introduced to the economy and politics of Russia, but the tsars were still not willing to share power.

The Russian Revolution in 1917, triggered by discontent with the autocratic system, brought a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists to power. Their policies were considered as a failure, which led to seizure of power by the Communist Bolsheviks. The Police of the Russian Empire was dissolved on 10 March 1917, and on April 17 the Provisional Government established the People’s Militia as a new law enforcement body. The Bolsheviks (and later the Communists) imposed a violent, centrally planned police system in Russia. The so-called Workers-Peasants Militia was established immediately after the October Revolution in 1917 for the protection of the new Soviet order.

From September 1918, the militia participated in the Red Terror, resulting in millions of victims. The police became one of the most powerful tools of the Communist party and the Soviet state. Between 1922 and 1991, the history of Russia is essentially the history of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s perestroika and the general weakening of the social and political controls were marked with widespread corruption. An anticorruption campaign was introduced, where by thousands of militiamen were fired or resigned.

The history of the Russian Federation starts in January 1992. The Federation was internationally recognized as the legal successor to the Soviet Union. However, Russia had lost its superpower status as it faced serious challenges in its efforts to forge a new post-Soviet system. Russia attempted to build an economy based on market capitalism, sometimes with painful results.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian government has been unsuccessful in its attempts to reform the militia by imitating change and implementing international police experience. After several serious incidents with high ranking police officials and widespread cases of corruption a new attempt was made to reform the police in 2009. The police force is part of a centralized system of federal executive authority, exercising its powers within the government. The 2011 police reform changed the financing of the police, excluding the involvement of local administration in law enforcement. The police force has several vertical levels of management and is today still highly centralized.

Estonia was part of the former Russian Empire. In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian revolutions, the Estonian Declaration of Independence was issued in February 1918. The Estonian War of Independence resulted in the Tartu Peace Treaty, recognizing Estonian independence. In 1939–1940, Estonia was occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union. During World War II, Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, then reoccupied by the Soviet Union in 1944. The country regained independence in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR and joined the European Union in 2004. Lauri Tabur explains in his chapter clearly that the Estonian police structures were reformed significantly from the Soviet militia, cutting the number of police management regions from 17 to 4 and merging police, border guard, and migration services in 2010 into one single institution.

From the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to Independent States

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, situated in the western part of the Balkans, was established in 1918 by the union of the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs and the Kingdom of Serbia (Bideleux & Jeffries, 2007). The Kingdom of Montenegro was annexed shortly after (Benson, 2001). The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by German,Footnote 1 Italian and Hungarian troops in 1941, and was abolished in 1943 and 1945. The Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia was proclaimed in 1943 by the resistance movement during World War II (Allock, 2000). It was renamed to the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. The country distanced itself from the Soviets and started to build its own way to socialism. Between 1945 and 1991 the Yugoslav police force was nevertheless called militia.

In 1963, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was again renamed to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and came under the strong political leadership of Josip Broz Tito (Martin, 1946). It was constituted in six Socialist Republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia) and two Socialist Autonomous Provinces (Vojvodina and Kosovo). Initially a centralized police force, the Yugoslav police became gradually more decentralized, transferring a lot of responsibilities to the individual republics (Hoptner, 1963).

Though the 1974 Constitution reduced the power of the federal government, Tito’s authority substituted for this weakness until his death in 1980. After Tito’s death in May 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. The constitutional crisis that followed resulted in a rise of nationalism in all republics: Slovenia and Croatia made demands for looser ties within the Federation; the Albanian majority in Kosovo demanded the status of a republic, Serbia, led by Slobodan Milošević, sought absolute dominion over Yugoslavia (Sell, 2002). Added to this, the Croat quest for independence led to large Serb communities within Croatia, rebelling and trying to secede from the Croat republic. These tensions led to the dissolving of the Yugoslav Communist party in 1990 and multiparty elections in all republics were organized. In Slovenia and Croatia elected governments oriented towards greater autonomy of the republics, since it became clear that Serbian domination and different levels of democratic standards were becoming increasingly incompatible. Starting in 1991, Yugoslavia disintegrated in the “Yugoslav Wars” (Benson, 2001).

The war broke out when the new regimes tried to replace Yugoslav civilian and military forces with secessionist forces. When in August 1990 Croatia attempted to replace police in the Serb populated Croat Krajina by force, the civilians organized armed resistance. These armed conflicts between the Croatian armed forces, called police, and civilians mark the beginning of the Yugoslav war that inflamed the region. A similar attempt in Bosnia and Herzegovina led to a war that lasted more than 3 years. This resulted in the almost complete emigration of the Serbs from all the regions, massive displacement of the populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the establishment of new independent states. The separation of Macedonia was rather peaceful (Magas, 1993).

In March 1991, demonstrations were held against Milošević in Belgrade, but the police and the military were deployed in the streets to restore order. The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), whose superior officers were mainly of Serbian ethnicity, maintained an impression of being neutral, but as time went by, they got more and more involved in state politics.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia became the first republics to declare independence from Yugoslavia. This gave rise to serious armed conflicts and bombings, eventually resulting in a ceasefire. The international community pressured Slovenia and Croatia to place a 3-month moratorium on their independence. During these 3 months, the Yugoslav Army completed its pull-out from Slovenia (Wingfield & Bucur, 2006).

After the declaration of independence of Slovenia from Yugoslavia in 1991 and the 10-day Slovenian Independence War, peace was consolidated by an agreement and the JNA retired out of Slovenia. Belgrade decided to try to focus on the power centers in the other parts of Yugoslavia. After some years, Slovenia became economically stable again and joined the EU in 2004. Slovenia adopted a constitution and the broad international recognition of the country is today the reality. Slovenia, in the meanwhile, became a member of the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and also joined other major international political, security, and economic organizations, e.g., the Council of Europe, the European Union, NATO, and the OECD.

Under the socialist system, the Slovenian police organization was quite decentralized, as Gorazd Meško, Branko Lobnikar, Maja Jere, and Andrej Sotlar in their chapter remind us. As a consequence of that, they stress that the uniformed and criminal police were not associated with political oppression before 1991. The police force today is organized into state, regional, and local levels. A landmark institutional reform of the police occurred in 1998 with the adoption of the new Police Act, which created a General Police Directorate as an autonomous body within the Ministry of Interior. Institutional reforms are closely linked to the process of centralization of the police. This is probably the result of state-building after an extremely difficult transition period. Concerning the actual police, the authors claim reasonable optimism and characterize the Slovenian police as a relatively modern and professional law enforcement service far closer to its western counterparts than to the former “militia.” Community policing is the foundation of its declared strategy. Two decades ago, police officers still perceived COP as a foreign concept (Brogden, 2005). Recent studies conclude that police officers and police chiefs increasingly perceive COP as the leading model of police work in local communities, which is followed by various organizational measures.

While in Slovenia, the moratorium on the independence had as a consequence that the Yugoslav Army left the country, in Croatia a bloody war broke out in the autumn of 1991 (Allock, 2000). Ethnic Serbs, who had created their own state Republic of Serbian Krajina (in heavily Serb-populated regions) resisted the police forces of the Republic of Croatia, who were trying to bring that breakaway region back under Croatian jurisdiction. Since Croatia did not have an army of its own, the Croatian police force played an important role in the military defense of the country.

According to Irma Kovčo Vukadin, Krunoslav Borovec, and Tajana Ljubin Golub, Croatia is in the process of transition from a communist country to a multiparty, democratic society and a market economy. Police reform is directed towards the development of democratic principles and of strengthening the rule of law. Some reform ideas have remained at the level of political rhetoric, but also many have been implemented. The Croatian police force is a national force and a centralized organization, headed by the Police Headquarters, with the exception of the City of Zagreb. Today, Croatia officially completed negotiations with the European Union and will become member of the EU in 2013. In 1990, Croatia began a process of democratic change, with the first democratic elections, and underwent a war of defense against the aggression initiated by the Yugoslav Army (Wingfield & Bucur, 2006).

In September 1991, the Republic of Macedonia also declared its independence, without too much resistance from the Belgrade-based Yugoslav authorities. The US soldiers were deployed under the UN banner to monitor Macedonia’s northern borders with the Republic of Serbia. As a result of the conflict, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a UN Security Council Resolution in 1991, which paved the way to the establishment of peacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia. The country is strongly committed to the Euro-Atlantic integration processes. Macedonia achieved all the criteria necessary for entry into NATO in 2008 and since 2005 obtained country-candidate status for the EU.

The fundamentals of Macedonian police organization are rooted in the policing model of former Yugoslavia. Since the independence in 1991, numerous transformation processes have taken place. Scholars Stojanka Mirčeva and Rade Rajkovčevski point out that the most distinct point during the transitional processes of the police organization, as well as in the society as a whole, was 2001, when an ethnic conflict resulted in an armed conflict. The most important novelty is the concept of -again- COP (Brogden, 2005). The Police Reform Project started in 2002, with the support by the European Commission of Justice and Home Affairs. The Strategy for Police Reform in Macedonia was adapted in 2003, led by the German police in 2005. In 2008, a new 2-year police reform project began, which was led by the French police. Currently, the operative functions of the National Police, including the Border Police, are implemented through the Central Police Services, the four Regional Border-control centers, and the territorial police.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1991, the Bosnian Serbs held a referendum which resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of a common state with Serbia and Montenegro. The referendum was proclaimed unconstitutional and invalid by the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in February–March 1992, the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina held a national referendum on Bosnian independence from Yugoslavia. That referendum was in turn declared contrary to the Federal constitution by the federal Constitution court in Belgrade (Aitchison, 2007). The republic’s government of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence on 5 April, and the Serbs immediately declared the independence of Republika Srpska. The war in Bosnia followed shortly thereafter.

International recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina increased diplomatic pressure on the JNA to withdraw from the republic’s territory, which they officially did. However, the Bosnian Serb members of JNA changed insignia, formed the Army of Republika Srpska, and continued fighting. Armed and equipped from JNA stockpiles in Bosnia, supported by volunteers and various paramilitary forces from Serbia, and receiving extensive support from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Republika Srpska’s offensives in 1992 managed to place much of the country under its control.

Initially, the Serb forces attacked the non-Serb civilian population in Eastern Bosnia (Bayerl, 2001). Once towns and villages were securely in their hands, the Serb forces—the military and the police, the paramilitaries and, sometimes, even Serb villagers—applied the same pattern: Bosniak houses and apartments were systematically burned, Bosniak civilians captured, and sometimes beaten or killed. 2.2 million refugees were displaced by the end of the war. Men and women were separated, with many of the men detained in camps. The women and indeed some children were kept in various detention centers where they had to live in bad conditions, where they were mistreated in many ways. Serb soldiers or policemen would come to these detention centers and raped women.

By 1993, when an armed conflict erupted between the predominantly Bosniak government in Sarajevo and the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, about 70 % of the country was controlled by Republika Srpska. Ethnic cleansing and civil rights violations against non-Serbs were rampant in these areas. One single most prominent example is the Srebrenica Massacre, ruled genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Many Bosnians were killed by the Serbian political authorities. In March 1994, the signing of the Washington Accords between the leaders of the republican government and Herzegovina-Bosnia led to the creation of a joint Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which absorbed the territory of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and that held by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Following the Srebrenica massacre, a NATO bombing campaign began in August 1995 against the Army of Republika Srpska. Meanwhile, a ground offensive by the allied forces of Croatia and Bosnia, based on the treaty in Split, pushed the Serbs away from territories held in western Bosnia which paved the way to negotiations. In December 1995, the signing of the Dayton Agreement in Dayton, Ohio by the presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia brought a halt to the fighting, roughly establishing the basic structure of the present-day state. A NATO-led peacekeeping force was immediately dispatched to Bosnia to enforce the agreement (Aitchison, 2007).

At the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Bosnian government charged Serbia with complicity in genocide in Bosnia during the war. The ICJ ruling of 26 February 2007 determined the war’s nature to be international, though exonerating Serbia of direct responsibility for the genocide committed by Serb forces. The ICJ concluded, however, that Serbia failed to prevent genocide committed by Serb forces and failed to punish those who carried out the genocide and bring them to justice.

In November 2012, the UN Security Council has extended the peacekeeping mandate for the International Police Task Force of the EU- and NATO-mission in Bosnia with 1 year. According to the council, the situation in the region stays a threat for security in the world. Today, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a territorially and politically complex entity, has a complex police structure, according to Mile Šikman and Velibor Lalić, the authors of this chapter. At the state level, the Ministry of Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina disposes of police agencies that perform police tasks. To a large extent, it is the task of the government to restructure the postcommunist and post-paramilitary police force; to reform the police training and selection; and to democratize the police forces by establishing a depoliticized, impartial, accountable, multiethnic police force, according to the principles of community policing. Apart from agencies at the state level, there are Ministries of the Interior in the different entities. In Republika Srpska, there is a Ministry of the Interior, and in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina there is a Ministry of the Interior of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of police tasks and authorities in the security area are conducted by cantonal Ministries of the Interior.

As the Yugoslav Wars raged through Croatia and Bosnia (Gagnon, 2004), the republics of Serbia and Montenegro, which remained relatively untouched by the war, formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, aspiring to be the legal successor of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The UN denied its request to automatically continue the membership of the state. Eventually, after the removal of Milošević from power as president of the federation in 2000, the country rescinded those aspirations and accepted the opinion of Badinter Arbitration Committee about shared succession, and gained UN membership. From 1992 to 2000, some countries, including the USA, referred to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as “Serbia and Montenegro” (Bayerl, 2001). The state was officially renamed Serbia and Montenegro in 2003.

Under the new Constitutional Charter, most federal functions and authorities devolved to the republic level. On 12 March 2003, Serbian Prime Minister was assassinated. The newly formed union government of Serbia and Montenegro reacted swiftly by calling a state of emergency and undertaking an unprecedented crackdown on organized crime which led to the arrest of more than 4,000 people. Parliamentary elections were held in the republic on 28 December 2003. Serbia had been in a state of political crisis since the overthrow of the postcommunist ruler, Milošević in 2001.

Želimir M. Kešetović, the author of this chapter, sketches that the police force was the pillar of the regime, whose main task was not to serve and protect the people, but instead the political regime. A number of high ranked police officers were involved in, or very close to, organized criminal groups. The police acted in a repressive way against political opponents of the regime, and the police model became highly centralized and militarized. After democratic changes, it became apparent that a complete revision of the security concept was a high priority and that immediate and substantive change in all the organizational and functional sections of the Ministry of Interior had to correct the serious shortcomings. Cornerstone challenges of this reform were flagged as the four “D’s”: depoliticization, decentralization, decriminalization and demilitarization. The reform process has been greatly helped by the international community. The years 2001 and 2002 represented a radical break with the past. A new organizational structure of the Ministry was set up. The reform of Serbian police turned out to be a very difficult task.

During the early-to-mid 1990s, Montenegro gave considerable support to Milošević’s war-effort. Montenegrin reservists fought on the Dubrovnik frontline. In April 1992, Montenegro decided to join Serbia in forming the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the Bosnian and Croatian wars, Montenegro participated with its police and military forces in the attacks on Dubrovnik (Croatia) and Bosnian towns along with Serbian troops, aggressive acts aimed at acquiring more territories by force, characterized by a consistent pattern of systematic violations of human rights. In the strategic orientation of Montenegro to become a part of the Euro-Atlantic integration, the Montenegrin police has been rapidly transformed into a modern police organization adapted to the collective security of NATO and the EU. A new referendum was announced in Montenegro to decide the future of the republic. The referendum resulted in a vote for independence, just above the 55 % borderline, set by the EU. Montenegro declared independence in 2006. The reform process of the Montenegrin police has remained strong after the declaration of independence, as Zoran Keković and Savo Kentera comment. It is a complex process because it has opened the issue of stable functioning of security institutions, with the simultaneous need to transform the police force in a complex multiethnic and multireligious environment.

On 17 February 2008, the Kosovo parliament unilaterally proclaimed independence from Serbia. The declaration was officially recognized by the USA, Austria, Great Britain, Germany, France, Turkey, and a dozen other countries. Serbia, Russia, China, and other countries opposed this declaration and considered it illegal. In July 2010, the United Nations International Court of Justice judged the separation of Kosovo legal (Warrander & Knaus, 2008). The new state of Kosovo has managed to build a police force that is based on democratic principles: equality, honor, transparency, and nondiscrimination (Bellamy, 2002). Kosovo Police acts according to the law on police and is organized in the central and local level, offering security services in the entire territory of Kosovo. The Kosovo Police Service was established in 1999 as an immediate need to provide security for the people of Kosovo. In this growth and development, the advice, support, and substantial assistance of the international community was very important, according to Driton Muharremi and Samedin Mehmeti, the authors of this chapter.

Conclusion

The police forces, resulting from described armed political transitions in Central and Eastern Europe are part of this history, and were even active actors in these processes, sometimes trespassing the borderlines between the functions of police forces and armies. Sometimes misused by regimes, sometimes voluntary organizations with own political targets (Baker, 2009). It is not a pure hazard that a military police force as the gendarmerie has functioned as the mould of police systems in different countries in earlier days. The history which can be derived from this book during a transversal reading shows an image of state-building, in which police forces are considered as important key-players.

The actual situation in most of the countries included in this book has become normalized, and also the position of the police organizations is to a large extent becoming more stable. The history shows that important international efforts have contributed to this evolution (Chesterman, 2004). It is clear that the central concept of Community Policing in this evolution is an important guideline, replacing servitude to political regimes with servitude to the populations of the countries described.

Most police systems in Central and Eastern Europe can still be characterized by strong central national or federal forces, as state police. Sometimes they dispose of explicit local branches in municipalities. Nevertheless, this proximity to the population in a local setting is an important accent in a matured COP vision, whether or not included in a unified police organization. From this point of view, there is still a long road to go in the region under study. But all this work starts with a comprehensive insight in the actual situation. This book contributes to a large extent this endeavor and serves this purpose.