> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://readau.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Europe scores well on the wrong exam - URL: https://readau.com/europe-scores-well-on-the-wrong-exam/ - Published: 2026-08-31T08:50:38.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-31T08:50:38.000Z - Author: Adam Ullmann - Tags: Essays Europe has the highest resilience score of any continent. It has the second-lowest criminality score, behind only Oceania. Its overall crime levels held steady between 2023 and 2025, while those across most of the rest of the world rose. This is the headline of the 2025 Global Organized Crime Index, and it is the kind of result that ends conversations rather than starting them. A continent that grades itself against Latin America and the Sahel will always come away reassured. The uncomfortable question is not whether Europe is doing well. It is whether the exam still measures the subject. ## What the index actually is The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime scores all 193 UN member states on two axes: criminality, built from fifteen criminal markets and five categories of criminal actor, and resilience, built from twelve indicators of institutional response. Everything runs on a 1–10 scale. Europe's 2025 scores are 4.74 for criminality and 6.28 for resilience. Note what resilience measures. It is capacity and posture — laws on the books, cooperation agreements, judicial machinery, regulatory reach. It assesses the response, not the result. A country can score highly for having excellent anti-money-laundering architecture while money continues to move through it at scale. The index is honest about this. Its readers frequently are not. That distinction matters more this year than last, because the 2025 edition contains a finding that quietly undermines the reassurance provided by the top-line numbers. ## The correlation that should worry Europe GI-TOC ran the numbers on how strongly resilience relates to individual criminal markets. For most markets, the relationship behaves as expected: stronger institutions, less crime. For two markets, it barely holds. Financial crime correlates with overall resilience at −0.240\. Cyber-dependent crime correlates at +0.324—the wrong sign entirely —meaning countries with the strongest institutional responses record *more* of it, not less. The positive figure is partly an artifact. Better states detect and report more, so measurement improves faster than the underlying problem shrinks. But that reading is generous, not exculpatory. If a decade of institution-building cannot produce a legible negative relationship in a market of this size, the institutions are not gripping. Both numbers point the same way. The political, judicial, economic and social apparatus that Europe leads the world in building has a marginal effect on these two markets. Now place that alongside Europe's own profile. Financial crime is the continent's most pervasive criminal market — for the second Index edition in a row. Europe is also among the world's worst-affected continents for cyber-dependent crime: ransomware, malware and cryptocurrency fraud aimed at governments, large firms and critical infrastructure, with state-sponsored operators increasingly wearing criminal disguise. So Europe's two largest and fastest-adapting criminal markets are precisely the two in which its principal advantage — institutional quality — has been shown to have almost no measurable purchase. That is the finding. Everything else is context. ## Stability is an average, not a condition. "Levels of organized crime remained stable across Europe" describes a mean drawn from 44 countries moving in different directions. Underneath it: **Cocaine and synthetic drugs recorded the sharpest increases since 2023.** Europe now functions simultaneously as a destination, transit hub and consumer market for cocaine, which has become a primary revenue source for a large number of European groups. Synthetic production is dispersing across the continent rather than concentrating, with Central and Eastern Europe registering the steepest rise since 2021. **Heroin is declining, and cannabis remains the most consumed illicit drug.** Both are consistent with global patterns. Both are, unhelpfully, the markets around which European drug policy discourse remains largely organized. **Human trafficking and smuggling remain entrenched**, with established networks along the Western Balkans route and many European states serving as terminal destinations where those smuggled are absorbed into forced labour or sexual exploitation. **The presence of criminal actors has risen steadily since 2021.** Foreign actors are the most concerning category and posted the largest overall increase — a European reflection of the sharpest actor-level increase recorded globally. These groups are described as heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and interconnected, which is a polite way of noting that the ethnically defined national mafia is no longer the organizing unit worth policing against. **Private-sector actors are central to laundering.** Not adjacent to organized crime. Inside its operating model: logistics, finance, and technology. Averages that hold steady while their components diverge this sharply are not evidence of stability. They show the aggregate has stopped being informative. ## The weakest indicator is the load-bearing one. Europe's resilience strengths are international cooperation, national policies and laws, and territorial integrity. Its lowest-scoring resilience indicator, consistently, is government transparency and accountability. Anti-money-laundering and economic regulatory capacity also lag. This is worth sitting with, because the 2025 Index also reports a specific dose–response relationship: a one-point increase in resilience corresponds to a 1.8-point reduction in the presence of state-embedded actors — officials, functionaries and insiders who let illicit activity through. Transparency and accountability are not one resilience indicator among twelve. They are the mechanism that checks the other eleven. A judiciary is only as sound as the scrutiny applied to it. Cooperation agreements are only as good as the honesty of what gets shared. Ports and airports — the chokepoints through which Europe's legal supply chains are infiltrated, and where dockside and enforcement corruption is documented — are governed almost entirely by whether anyone is genuinely watching. Europe leads the world on the indicators that describe what it has built and trails its own profile on the indicator that determines whether it is being used honestly. The continent is not scoring badly. It is scoring well on inputs and weakly on the input that governs the others. ## The two things nobody has priced in First, resilience has plateaued. Globally, criminal markets grew while resilience scores flattened. This is a slow structural fact rather than a shock so that it will be ignored. Europe's own resilience has improved steadily since 2021, but improvement measured against a rising and adapting adversary is not the same as adequacy. Second, the war in Ukraine remains an unresolved variable in both directions. Criminal actors adapted to the conflict environment after 2022 — arms, trafficking routes, wartime procurement. The less-discussed possibility is that a ceasefire or settlement opens its own set of opportunities: demobilized men, weapons without owners, reconstruction contracts at speed and scale, and a compressed political timeline that makes oversight look like obstruction. Peace is not automatically a reduction in organized crime. It redistributes it, and Europe currently has no serious public conversation about that. There is also the recruitment problem — the drawing of young people into networks that have made themselves more attractive and more diverse in their offer. That belongs to a different essay, but it is the demand side of everything above. ## What the numbers do not license They do not license alarm. Europe is genuinely among the least criminally affected regions in the world, and the institutional achievement behind that is real. They do not license reassurance either. The 2025 Index describes a continent whose defences were built against an adversary that has moved. Europe's institutional architecture was designed for territorial, violent, hierarchical crime — the mafia, the cartel, the smuggling route — and it works reasonably well against those. The growth is in non-violent, intangible, transnational crime: fraud, cyber-attacks, laundering and counterfeit trade, fed by exactly the economic insecurity now spreading across the continent. Against these, the index's own statistics show resilience does little. **A high score against the wrong test is not a defence. It is a delay in noticing.** --- *Figures from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Global Organized Crime Index 2025 — "Crime at a crossroads," and its Europe continental overview (published February 2026). The Index covers all 193 UN member states on a 1–10 scale for both criminality and resilience.*