Building an Internal Security Community: The Democratic Peace and the Politics of Extradition in Western Europe

This article extends democratic peace research, which has predominantly focused on the absence of war, to the field of internal security cooperation. It argues that the mechanisms suggested by democratic peace research (responsiveness of democratic leaders to public demands, democratic norms and culture, and institutional constraints) can also be applied to the field of internal security cooperation: democratic leaders can be expected to respond to citizens’ demands for enhanced internal security and to strive towards international cooperation in internal security. Moreover, democracies tend to form security communities and to define their security in common terms, which also encourages mutual assistance on issues of internal security. At the same time, however, democratic leaders’ ability to engage in international cooperation is circumscribed by domestic institutions that safeguard individual rights. In sum, the mechanisms suggested by democratic peace research can capture both the incentives and difficulties of international cooperation on internal security among democratic states. The case of extradition politics, which impacts both on the internal security of states and on standards of individual rights (such as fair trial), serves to illustrate this point: since there is no general obligation for states to extradite fugitives, extradition has traditionally been based on a series of bilateral treaties. Starting in the 1950s, the members of the Council of Europe, all of which are liberal democracies, have negotiated multilateral conventions designed to facilitate extradition among them. The high level of interdependence and trust among the members of the European Union has led to more far-reaching agreements, culminating in a European arrest warrant, which effectively overcomes remaining barriers to extradition. In congruence to the democratic peace perspective, requests from non-democratic states to become part of that regime have been turned down.