Fusion Centers in Germany: Cases of Successfully Failing Organizations?

• In Event: Intelligence in Democracies: Dynamic or Dormant

Abstract

This paper addresses the emergence and organizational behavior of a series of so-called “joint centers” in Germany’s federal system of government, which have been established over the course of the past two decades to improve communication, intelligence sharing, and coordination of operations among law enforcement agencies and intelligence services from both state and federal levels of government. Similar to international trends towards fusion centers, this approach has been accompanied by high expectations to strengthen the organizational capacity of the national security community to respond to threats from serious crime and (home-grown and international) terrorism in particular. At the same time, this development has raised concerns about the infringement of civil liberties, the lack of political control and accountability, as well as the propensity of administrative inefficiencies that are associated with this organizational form.

Against this background, this paper is geared to examine the potential assets and liabilities of the “fusion center model” through the perspective of organization theory, particularly based on sociological variants of neo-institutionalist approaches. The paper is meant to be descriptive in that it presents the institutional setting of Germany’s domestic security agencies as well as its recent reform. The paper also aims to be analytical and explanatory inasmuch as it accounts for the trajectory towards fusion centers – and the political and administrative dynamics behind it.

Empirically, the analysis of this case is set in the context of Germany’s national system of law enforcement agencies and intelligence services – a system known for its significant degree of decentralization and fragmentation of organizational jurisdictions. Vertically, the domestic set of security agencies is divided by lines of demarcation between state and federal levels of government. Horizontally, the divide runs through police authorities and intelligence services, which are kept separate by a legal firewall, effectively limiting the chance of organizational mergers between police and intelligence agencies. In response to this fragmentation, fusion centers are meant to by-pass or at least mitigate the boundaries between levels of governments and different sets of organizations by establishing “platforms for intelligence sharing and cooperation” while safeguarding the legal independence of participating agencies.

Theoretically, this paper is informed by the sociological strand of the neo-institutionalist literature when analyzing the organizational features of the fusion center approach in Germany’s federal system. Consequently, the degree of institutionalization depends as much on cognitive and cultural components (i.e. shared knowledge, norms, values, role understandings) as on regulatory elements (i.e. formal rules and processes, organizational structures). It follows from this that fusion centers face a dilemma situation: In order to enhance the (informal) flow of information between different sets of organizations and professionals, they need to rely on loosely coupled, informal, even personalized relations between participating agencies. However, in order to improve inter-agency coordination, streamline procedures, and produce reliable results (which may also allow for administrative oversight and political accountability), they need to rely on formalized, if not bureaucratic structures and processes. As a result, fusion centers may succeed in one respect, but will necessarily fail in the other.

Author

• Eckhard Schroeter, German University of the Police