L’Union européenne et le narco-système mondial

Abstract

Only in the late ’80s became the European Union an international actor in the fight against drugs. Limited at first to police and customs cooperation, its action was reinforced by the successive treaties (Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and, most recently, Lisbon). Its competences on these issues, however, remain subject to the rules of national sovereignty, and to the logics of intergovernmental cooperation. This raises the question whether those constraints are up to the challenges posed by transnational criminal trafficking, of which drug trafficking is the most pervasive one for a Europe now partially united, but brutally confronted with the globalisation of crime.