A ‘police culture’?

To what extent does the fact of being a police officer play a role in the perception we have of delinquency phenomena and their evolution? This is the question David Pichonnaz (sociology teacher and researcher at the University of Lausanne) asks first, at the beginning of a study dedicated to young police recruits in his country.

The author, who used the method of ‘ethnographic’ interviews, collected accounts from 21 individuals, taking care to vary the police force to which they belong, their gender, age, social background, type of career path and the former profession of the interviewees.

First observation: the opinion on the overall fall in respect for ‘authority’ is, to say the least, widespread in the policing world (Switzerland). All the policemen and policewomen questioned consider that the main element that can lead a young person to delinquency is the lack of ‘family support’ as well as a lack of severity in the school and legal systems, which fail to convey ‘limits’ and the necessary ‘framework’ for the satisfactory development of young people.

But we would be wrong to limit ourselves to this alarmist diagnosis and the underlying intrinsic ‘pessimism’. Pichonnaz does indeed show that this pessimism is ‘unevenly distributed’ among new recruits and that it is actually more determined by the origins and social trajectory of the individuals than by their professional experience.

The pessimism of the police officer is far more pronounced among those who have suffered a loss of status before their entry into the profession. At the same time, the rural origins of individuals strengthen this feeling. “Their pessimistic diagnosis”, the author explains, “is based on classic ‘examples of anti-urban feeling’. One of the causes behind this, is the idea that towns destroy ‘the ancestral community’ and ‘the village represents the good old days of the past, when humans lived in harmony’”. On the contrary, individuals from the middle classes, or those who place themselves in a phase of upward social mobility, have a less pessimistic view of delinquency phenomena.

As many studies have proven, pessimism has negative consequences, even harmful ones, on police professionalism. To be reflected upon...

Who is afraid of post-war Germany?

As for Christoph Brüll (FRS-FNRS research associate and lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Liège), he deals with a completely different subject. He focuses on the rapprochement between Belgium and Germany, straight after the Second World War. More precisely, he insists on presenting the policy set up to integrate the Federal Republic (FRG) in the ‘Western Bloc’ in order to guarantee the safety of Belgium.

On 5 May 1955, i.e. 10 years after the end of the Second World War, the FRG regained its sovereignty and became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which meant the creation of a German army and the rearming of the young state. Then, in November 1955, Belgium and the FRG entered into negotiations with a view to liquidating the main after-effects of 1940-1945, which resulted in a bilateral agreement several months later. Finally, the construction of Europe entered a new phase, which would lead to the Treaties of Rome on 25 March 1957. For both our countries, it was a question of normalising their relations through ‘Europeanisation’.

In this extremely rapid political process, ‘defiance disappeared, but not mistrust’. At the time, Germany was still represented as a nation intrinsically endowed with a ‘hegemonic will’, which had to be curbed by its integration into the Western Bloc. According to Christophe Brüll’s analysis, this was the main theme of the principal Belgian ministers of foreign affairs who, in turn, worked towards a Belgian/German rapprochement: Paul-Henri Spaak, Paul van Zeeland and Pierre Harmel.

For 35 years, or in other words, until the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Belgian policy concerning the ‘German question’ was characterised by a noticeable paradox that Brüll endeavours to reveal: a policy of rapprochement, accompanied by a rhetoric of mistrust, an expression – in his opinion – of the search for security that lies at the heart of this policy.

For Brüll, this notion of ‘security’ mustn’t be understood from a purely strategic and military point of view. It must also integrate softer factors of political science and sociology, in particular ‘fear’. Security, and the need for security, aren’t static or even a-historical concepts, he suggests, drawing on existing scientific works. “It is a question of social constructions, which largely stem from forms of identity and relations with otherness”.

Also drawing inspiration from diplomatic documentation, opinion polls and the written press, the author examines in detail the ‘widespread fear' that characterised Belgian policy with regard to Germany, after 1947, even though the USSR was clearly defined as the ‘new enemy’.  The question of the place of the new West German state would indeed become a hotly debated issue, he points out, at the time of the Berlin Blockade and, above all, the Korean War.