Police systems and political regimes
Rob I. Mawby suggests three dimensions of police systems for comparison: legitimacy, structure and function. Legitimacy is the source of police power. For example, a social elite, the popular will or an external power. Structures separate the police from other institutions. Structural variations include territorial divisions, hierarchies, functional divisions within and between forces, and the relationship between public and private forms of policing. Function assumes a distribution of tasks including maintenance of law and order and prevention and detection of offences.Police and policing in exist in a wider environment and react to inputs from law makers, law breakers, from civil society and citizens, and from inside and beyond national frontiers. Changes in respect of any of these can result in changes in a police system. Equally, a police system contributes to its environment.
Police systems in a state socialist environment
János Kornai defined socialism as a ‘social-political-economic’ system based on observed historical formations, rather than on ideas. This led him to focus on the party monopoly on power as the defining element. Change in this monopoly, rather than economic policy, reflects a transition away from socialism.Party power and police legitimacy
Many communist governments took power during, or just after, periods of revolution, war and disorganisation. The subsequent focus on retaining power was central to Kornai’s analysis. Yugoslavia is something of a special case. As a successful national liberation movement, the partisan movement enjoyed a greater degree of power. Still, early acts of repression show the regime adopting a defensive position. By 1986, party membership stood at 9.3%, somewhere between Mongolia (4.5%) and Romania (16%). Faced with an ambivalent population, protecting a regime based on the undivided political power of the ruling party was a key task of legal and police systems.In terms of the legitimacy, the party was the sole source of police authority. In all areas of state activity, the party played a key role in decision making, in supervising state action and in making appointments, leading to the ‘interpenetration’ of state and party. In Yugoslavia, the 1948 split with Stalin encouraged the development of an alternative model of socialism involving greater local autonomy and self-management. Nonetheless, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) was the basic political force and the country remained a one party state.
The party authorizes the police. The police enforce party domination. But because of their access to means of violence and surveillance, the police can threaten centres of power in the party structure. The party reacts to this periodically, as seen in the removal of Aleksandar Ranković, head of the Interior Ministry and secret police in Yugoslavia.
Structure
There is not one communist model of territorial structures of policing, rather general territorial structures of government shape police structures. Countries with some element of federalism (Czechoslovakia after 1969, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia) reflect this in their police structures, although strong central oversight through the party remained. In Yugoslavia policing was divided functionally between the political Division for the Protection of the People (established with Soviet guidance and later changed to the State Security Service) and a Service for Public Protection.In line with self-management and reforms geared towards destatisation, Yugoslavia developed a further element of the police system: the socialisation of security’. Responsibility for protecting their own property fell on social enterprises involved in production and socially owned security enterprises were established.
Function
Regime protection was a central function. Police functions have an implication on who is employed within the service and party penetration of the police was particularly high.Patterns of property ownership further reinforce the function of the police in defending the party regime. Law and police are historically tied to the protection of property and productive capacity. De-privatized ownership mean the position of property in socialist economies is distinctive from that found under capitalism. Party control of property, through state ownership of the means of production, means that the protection of property is another dimension of protecting the party and reinforces the police role in the party-state-bureaucracy nexus of power.
Post-socialist trajectories and policing in Bosnia and Herzegovina
A special issue of the Slavic Review in 1999 observed that the now ex-socialist regimes in Europe shared certain similarities in form and functioning of regimes, trends leading to regime collapse and the rapidity of the end of single party systems. These commonalities were contrasted with diverse outcomes in terms of post-socialist regimes. Some states successfully consolidated domestic reforms, other slip back to or never really escape authoritarian rule, while the bulk occupy Carothers’ ‘grey zone’ in between.Within Yugoslavia, single party rule ended in stages. Slovenia and Croatia were the first republics to hold multi-party elections in the spring of 1990, while BiH and others waited until the end of the year. The elections in BiH handed power to three ethnically-based parties which continue to play a major role in politics today. Control of the police and territorial defence units became contentious as the republic, still part of federal Yugoslavia, had no other armed forces. Throughout 1991, tensions mounted between the three parties. By spring 1992 the country was in a de facto situation of war and remained so until external intervention imposed peace in 1995. The dominant drivers of policing in BiH are as much post-conflict as they are post-socialist, reflecting the interaction of legacies of communism and conflict.
Legitimation
In socialist BiH police authority and legitimacy derived from the party, as in other socialist regimes. This was overlaid with ethnic considerations, ensuring leadership posts were shared across ethnic groups. These two factors combined in the new context emerging from the 1990 elections. The three successful parties acted as representatives of ‘their’ people in nominating police chiefs and other senior officers. Tensions surrounding this were part of the process leading to war. The fragmentation of the police along ethnic lines was clearly evident by March of 1992.At the end of the war two competing sources of legitimation are evident: local sub-state units and external actors. The immediate post-war period saw the division of police authority across sub-state units in BiH. The Republika Srpska and many of the Cantons in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina were now more ethnically homogenous and local police authority provided ethnically-based security to majority groups. At the same time, peace agreements and international institutions supported the right to return for millions of refugees and displaced people. This required oversight of local police to ensure that minority returnees were secure and that they were not victimized by police tied to local ethno-political elites. International oversight applied to individual officers and police organisations and was undertaken primarily by UN and EU missions.
Structure
The territorial fragmentation of state policing in BiH has already been identified. Peace agreements at Washington (1994) and Dayton (1995) translated wartime divisions into peacetime police boundaries, and limited central state policing powers. International agencies in BiH promoted an expansion of police functions under central state control and even attempted (and failed) to implement a consolidated framework for policing with local police areas established without reference to existing entity and cantonal boundaries.A UN certification process saw large numbers excluded from the police, in part as a response to police involvement in war crimes and in part dealing with the entry of untrained personnel into the police between 1990 and 1995.
In the former Yugoslavia, where socially owned security firms did exist, their function was the protection of socially owned as opposed to individual property. At the end of the war, prior to the establishment of a legal framework for commercial security services, demobilized soldiers and dismissed police officers moved into this sector. Armin Kržalić's survey of licences granted in BiH suggests slow growth.
BiH joined Interpol while at war in 1992. Like other Western Balkan states, BiH’s policing is somewhat shaped by the requirements of EU association and accession. It also responds to more direct international intervention. I wrote elsewhere on the EU role in shaping policing in BiH, and voiced concerns that the EU’s narrow focus on its own security concerns risks marginalizing those of BiH’s citizens. Nonetheless, even in a small and apparently relatively weak state, domestic political forces successfully resisted EU attempts to impose a single state structure of policing. This is a good illustration of David Bayley’s view that police structures resist external change.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s trajectory and post-socialist police systems
New regimes require new forms of legitimation and this extends to police systems. In BiH and the other cases studied, efforts were made to find new sources of legitimation for the police in the absence of single party rule. In BiH the first shift in legitimation was still very much linked to the parties in power and was associated with the stalling of the transition and development of conflict. Post-war international oversight in BiH has addressed this to some extent.All countries studied engaged in replacing internal security personnel but with variation in how and when it was carried out. Both the Georgian and Bosnian examples show continuity in that the police remained, in the first instance, tied closely to a particular party or governing regime. In both, this is associated with a subsequent breakdown in peace and order. In each of these states, further waves of lustration take place at a later stage. Changes of personnel in line with shifts in power serve important symbolic and practical ends. As well as changes to the personnel, other changes of an important symbolic nature took place including the renaming of forces, changes in ranks and changes in uniform. This apparent shift to civilianisation sometimes sits uneasily against public information campaigns which police in more military style clothing and carrying long-barrelled weapons in the battle against organized crime, particularly in BiH.
Commercial forms of security were largely undeveloped in state-socialist police systems and have experienced ‘sudden booms’ and ‘spectacular growth’ in the subsequent period, but with significant variation. Variable growth can be explained by a range of contextual factors, including legal frameworks, demand and supply.
New possibilities for private enterprise, including in the security sector, combined with a rise of private property to create a potential market and a framework for provision. The collapse of the centrally planned economies and the introduction of market liberalisation opened formerly socialist states to a new level of consumerism and the commodification of goods and services previously provided by the state.
On the demand side of the equation, failures of state police make various forms of private security more attractive. Fear generated by increasing crime rates and the visibility of crime was common across the post-socialist world and further insecurities specific to post-war contexts featured in BiH (and Georgia). On the supply side, a boom in private security was fed by changes in state police personnel.
The opening up of previously closed economies also created opportunities for major players in the globalized security industry to extend their reach into post-socialist countries. Starting from a controlling stake in Alarm West in 2010, Securitas now employs 1,900 staff in BiH. Compared to Poland, growth in BiH and Georgia was slow, suggesting that even in the context of a security gap, a minimum of security and stability is required for the industry to develop.
In BiH, the fragmented structure of the state and state policing is reflected in companies operating in only one political unit, whether entity, canton or district. The difficulties of establishing firms in more than one entity, while not insurmountable, may have slowed consolidation and growth in the sector.
As the opening up of states in the post-socialist period generated the conditions for participation in a global security market, it also created the opportunity for greater police cooperation across borders and with states outside the former communist bloc. Arguably it made such cooperation more important, but it is structured by the integration of states in global and regional frameworks for cooperation. Of post-communist states 12 joined the EU, 4 are candidates, 2 potential candidates and a further 6 are in the Eastern Partnership scheme.
The central function of protecting and maintaining the regime has been identified in socialist police systems. Post socialist policing is often associated with a reorientation public protection. After the end of single-party rule, certain police functions also develop around the need for protection of the democratic form of politics and associated freedoms, securing the space for free political debate.
While the crime control element of policing was never absent under socialist governments, shifts in the balance between private and state ownership of property mean the police crime prevention and detection role is reoriented towards serving the public and businesses rather than the state. Each country studied took steps to break the police-party link in terms of functions of regime protection, but again with variation in timing, with Georgia being the last to do so.
In the full version of this paper, Poland, Georgia and BiH provide examples of states which made a relatively clear break from socialist power structures. They experienced divergent trajectories and development of police systems. Poland shows the clearest example of a clear and quick break, and more than 25 years on it makes as much sense to describe it in terms of its present as against its socialist past. It provided the best environment for such a break: a well-formed civic movement ready to displace and dismantle the authoritarian regime. In Georgia and BiH there was no strong, unified, and non-nationalist civic alternative to communist successors. In these two cases, the result was conflict which undermines a clear break. This shaped the development of the BiH police system through external intervention and oversight, while it took an internal revolution to challenge police abuses in Georgia. In these cases both the domestic and international environments shaped the police system, which can be understood as both post-conflict and post-socialist. If these states are also able to make a clearer break from remaining legacies of their past, it will make sense to remove them from a category defined by that past.
