In textbooks, globalization may have its good sides and less-good sides, but there are no redeeming features to the dark side of globalization - organized crime with global reach.

To get a ripe taste of this dark underbelly of globalization and its spread in Europe, dip into the latest book by Misha Glenny, a journalist who gained international attention with his reporting on the horrors of wars and bloodshed in the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. In McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, Glenny makes the case, all too convincingly, that Eastern Europe, with its new and fragile democratic systems, has become the gateway for criminal syndicates that match the best multinationals in their professional skills in exploiting the new potential for illicit goods and services to pass borders with the freedom enjoyed by normal trade.

According to Glenny, the “global shadow economy” now accounts for 15-20% of the world’s economic transactions and its epicenter resides in new EU states where governments are still trying to organize their defenses against the criminal spillover from the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Glenny’s book of reportage and analysis is reviewed by Michael Mosettig, a foreign affairs producer at the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, in the forthcoming issue of European Affairs. He starts by admiring Glenny’s title - “McMafia” - as a way of evoking “[their] global reach as criminal ‘corporations’ aspire to penetrate markets the world over - mirroring the global goals of legal entities such as McDonald’s.”

In this global overview, Glenny implicates Europe in McMafia’s success because it provides the market for illegal labor, drugs and illicit goods. This traffic uses the Balkan states as a highway, but other Eastern and Central European states play their roles, too, as gateways for criminal activity to enter the EU. Glenny makes it clear that, so far, EU crime-fighting strategies have failed to curb McMafia’s activities. Just last week, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn confirmed that the EU may freeze millions of euros in aid to Bulgaria because of its government’s inadequate efforts to fight the organized crime and corruption which has flooded the country.

Preview Mosettig’s review of McMafia on the European Institute’s website.

By Francois Clemenceau

At last there is a book- authoritative but not yet translated into English- that answers the tormenting question of why the two most wanted mass murderers of the Yugoslav civil wars have never been brought to justice a decade after international warrants were issued for them. Despite repeated reports of their imminent arrests, the pair – Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who headed the Bosnian Serbs’ army – have managed to elude capture and extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

(more…)

Michael Mosettig reviews the new book Life of a European Mandarin by Derk-Jan Eppink, who was a civil servant at the European Commission for more than a decade. 

Life of a European Mandarin.
By Derk-Jan Eppink. Ianoo. 386 pages.

Reviewed by Michael D. Mosettig

Two decades ago television viewers in Britain and the United States were alternately amused and appalled as they laughed through episodes of “Yes, Minister,” a British situation comedy about the way government bureaucracies really work at the top among insiders. In the series, a clever, glib high-ranking civil servant named Sir Humphrey would run circles around his Cabinet minister, aware that his power came from institutional memory and career longevity while the minister, an elected Member of Parliament, would soon be off on other pursuits.

Now, a former civil servant of the European Commission has turned out on paper the Brussels equivalent of “Yes, Minister,” an amusing memoir of how things work and don’t work at the Berlaymont headquarters of the commission. Perhaps the Life of a European Mandarin can be worked up into a European-wide sitcom – “Yes, Commissioner” – though to be true to Brussels protocol it would have to be dubbed and aired in 23 languages.

(more…)