The Gendarmerie Alternative: Is There a Case for the Existence of Police Organisations with Military Status in the Twenty-First Century European Security Apparatus?

Abstract

Historical literature traditionally assimilates gendarmerie forces with old-fashioned, centralised, colonial, or totalitarian regimes. Similarly, the media and much of the current academic literature seem to consider the gendarmerie model as antiquated, and unable to meet the demands of public accountability or human rights compliance associated with modern democratic policing. How then can France, Italy or the Netherlands still reasonably promote it as a credible policing alternative? Gendarmeries receive very little attention from the Anglo-American criminal justice community. On closer inspection however, it appears that gendarmeries are tasked to perform public order, riot control and criminal police duties in many European democracies. This unique association of military semantics and civilian police tasks symbolises the modern gendarmerie concept, which can provide a substantial added value with public, specialised and professional police units. This critical analysis of the existing literature examines how gendarmeries are viewed by the English-speaking academic community, and most importantly, why this perception has become flawed. One of the lead arguments is that the terminology habitually used to describe the gendarmerie model, because it wrongly suggests a persistent functional discrepancy between these forces and their civilian counterparts found for instance in common-law countries, actually conceals the fact that gendarmeries have become important actors on the European policing scene. The study singles out arguments which demonstrate that police forces bearing a military status present useful credentials to promote the liberal-democratic policing ideal in twenty-first century Europe.