Christian denomination in the world, especially large (and growing) in the
Third World, the Vatican and its various bureaucracies is in some ways an
enormously powerful international body, as well as being an extremely rich
one, despite past problems with its own merchant bank. To have such an
organization headquartered in the capital of any one country without formal
political independence would be potentially extremely dangerous, hence the
general preparedness to treat the Vatican as a genuine state.
Paramilitary Forces
Paramilitary forces are those uniformed, armed and disciplined bodies that
exist in most countries to carry out internal security and policing functions
which are beyond the capacity of ordinarypoliceforces. Frequently the
boundaries between what would be considered an ordinary police force and
a paramilitary force are very blurred. Nevertheless, most countries have found
it necessary to retain a force to cope with, for example, serious rioting and
disorderly demonstrations, equipped for and allowed to use greater force than
even police forces that are normally armed. Such forces are usually trained in a
very different way, have no responsibility for the day-to-day police work that
requires some degree of acceptability by the citizens, and are often under a
different political command structure than the civilian police. In France, for
example, thegendarmerieis the nation-wide paramilitary police and quite
separate from either the local or national police, and comes under the authority
of the minister of defence, rather than the ministers of justice or the interior; in
Germany the police function is constitutionally the responsibility of theLa ̈nder,
but the federal government has created a paramilitary border police force
under the authority of the federal interior ministry which not only does that
job, but acts as a mobile and heavily-armed riot police. Theoretically at least,
the United Kingdom has no such force, but this would not invariably be seen,
even by liberals, as necessarily a protection against the use of undue force;
either the police force would have to jeopardize its relationship with the public
by using greater than usual force, or the regular army would have to be
deployed, to control widespread outbreaks of disorder (seeaid to the civil
power). As the traditional role of the military in the West declines with the
ending of thecold war, the armed forces in many countries are, in fact, trying
to stress their own utility in such situations, so the distinction between
paramilitary and military may well become eroded.
The political/constitutional heritage of a country has much to do with the
presence or absence of such forces. In the UK, Canada, the USA and
Australasia there has always been a very considerable fear of centralized police
authority, indeed of police power at all, and a heavily armed and centrally
controlled paramilitary force would never have been accepted because of the
Paramilitary Forces