Policing and planning cross-border surveillance during the cold war. The South Tyrolean case

This essay investigates the organisation and plans for cross-border police surveillance during the 1960s and 1970s in the key border area of South Tyrol, in Northern Italy. At a time when political and ethno-nationalist terrorism appeared, the threats it posed took on an international character. This study seeks to understand the re-organisation of police surveillance and the militarisation of borders in peacetime, investigating continuities and ruptures in the history of policing in Republican Italy; it focuses on the exchange of knowledge between security experts and the transformation of organisation and practices of police officers with the task of monitoring borders. This leads on to propose conceptual reflections on the formats, effects and boundary-setting in transnational police actions, as well as on the spaces of interaction between transnational actors in the recent past. Which of these are devices of police border surveillance? How were areas of competence assigned to different Public Security bodies? What did they represent for the history of the police of Republican Italy? How was cross-border surveillance negotiated and how was it organised? How did the exchange of knowledge develop police cooperation and how did this influence diplomatic relations between Italy and Austria during the cold War? Cross-border surveillance took on an important role in the relations between states in negotiating areas of surveillance and legitimate competencies. This study is based on unpublished documents created by the Ufficio Affari Riservati (U.A.R.) of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, which make it possible to reconstruct an organisation chart of the civilian and military corps engaged at the border and to investigate the cross-border Italian–Austrian police cooperation in its theoretical and technical-scientific aspects.