Money Laundering

This chapter provides an overview of the role of the European Union in the emergence, consolidation and development of the governance of money laundering. In particular, it identifies three sets of factors that explain the role of the European Union in the global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regime. These are the motivation and policy content of the AML regime as driven by key states; the promotion of particular standards through global, regional, and national organizations; and the proliferation of AML practices among both regulators and the regulated. The chapter finds that European states (though no EU coalition of states) have significant influence in the shaping of global AML standards; they are also at the vanguard of the peer review process that leads to their global diffusion. At the same time, the European Commission has developed extensive expertise on AML to guide global debates and ‘translate’ the resulting rules into EU policy.