Schengen visa liberalisation has become the European Union’s engagement ring countries in South Eastern Europe that aspire to membership of the bloc.

Perhaps it was coincidence that around the same day that the European Commission recommended that visa exemption be given to citizens of Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was reported from Sarajevo that 45 people had been arrested for alleged organised crime activities, including illegal drugs and weapons smuggling. The two states were given the news by Brussels about visas after being left waiting in December 2009 when Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia were exempted from visa requirements.

Serbia, where president Boris Tadic has made a new pledge that his country would come down hard against organised crime, in recent weeks announced that it would set up with Croatia a joint centre against organised crime. A month earlier, a group of 20, made up of Serbians and Montenegrins was arrested in connection with the smuggling of 2.6 tons of cocaine from South America.

In Belgrade, the assassination of Zoran Djindjić is anything but forgotten. Nor is any country in the Balkans, or South Eastern Europe if you prefer, exempt from association in the Western European public mind with organised crime. This is part of the public issue about immigration and the free flow of people allowed by EU membership; it may be a contributing factor in "enlargement fatigue".

It may be argued that the incentive of possible EU membership motivates governments of candidate countries to deal with organised crime. It may, however, not be true that EU membership, and the benefits brought by it, has a universally beneficial effect. Independent research has found that since Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in January 2007, the number of people trafficked into Germany for the sex industry has gone up.

However you define "organised crime" or even if you reject the term as inappropriate (a story elsewhere on these pages, linked to this one, explores that issue) it is in many cases transnational. This is not just the case in incidents such as the 2008 murder in Zagreb of publisher Ivo Pukanic, or that fact that some authorities in Bulgaria have alleged that
Serbian hitmen were brought in for the high-profile killings of some "controversial businessmen" (a favoured media code phrase) in Sofia, it is also to do with countries in the region having served as transit points – and to a lesser extent, clients – for drug smuggling and as source countries for people trafficking.

By the by, part of the debate about organised crime in South Eastern Europe involves suggesting that some governments may prefer to suggest that its transnational nature makes it difficult for them to deal with. In short, blame-shifting; it wasn’t me, sir, it was that nasty boy next door.

The transnational nature of many kinds of crime that are organised also underlines that it is hardly unique to the region of South Eastern Europe, even if it can persuasively be argued that the way that organised crime arose in various individual countries in the region is not the same as it did elsewhere in the world.

The nature of international crime means that it cannot be fought solely at the individual national level. (Nor, as per the debate among criminologists about the phenomenon, should it be believed that all "organised crime" activities involve a hierarchical structure; and nor that even if it does, beheading it solved the problem.)

In an interview, Peter Gastrow, a Senior Fellow and Director of Programs at the International Peace Institute in New York, and who works on strategies to counter transnational organised crime, quotes German chancellor Angela Merkel: "The greatest consequence of globalisation is that there are not any purely national solutions to global challenges".

"And organised crime has become global," Gastrow says. "I’m not talking about the local guys getting involved in prostitution, that’s local. Once it is trafficking, then it becomes international. And there’s no national solution to that."

A further question is the extent of organised crime anywhere, let alone in South Eastern Europe. Researchers call official statistics into question, suggesting that these may have been manipulated.

Further, varying definitions, along with differences in legislation around the region make it difficult to assess the extent of "organised crime" or of successes against it – especially given that it has become conventional wisdom that flashy arrests do not necessarily translate into years in jail. Further still, there are those who argue that organised crime will not be solved solely by putting people into prison cells, but it is the activity itself that must be tackled, and that could be done by dealing with the socio-economic causes that make people resort to illegal activities.

Allowing for the fact that with weaknesses and differences in definitions and measurements – not least complicated by the fact that those directly involved in illegal activities are not likely to be willing to respond to inquiries – there are some factual indications that in several countries in South Eastern Europe, the transition has or is being made from outright violent crimes to legitimisation of business; possibly even a full transition into legal business.

Most of all, though perhaps not all in the more hysterical sections of the anti-immigration lobby in the West may agree, it may not be appropriate to typecast the Balkans as a nest of organised crime, which at the same time is not to say that Brussels and Washington, among others, are incorrect in their pressure on governments to do something serious about it.

Again, the question comes back to the reliability of indicators; those headline-catching estimates of the illegal economy as a share of GDP are, after all, estimates.
And if membership of the EU represents that a country is free of illegal activities such as trafficking in people, weapons or drugs, this hardly explains the markets and networks in existing EU member states.