Reconfiguring EU external boundaries: competence and control
The integration crises of the past decade have put the configuration and governance of the external borders of the European Union (EU) in the political and scientific focus. In this project, we examine the development of the external border regime of the EU from the vantage point of competence-control-theory. In any political system, the definition and control of borders are a central aspect of political development. In the multi-level-system of the EU, border governance is particularly complex, because the EU's external borders are state borders at the same time, the regulation of these borders is divided and contested between the EU and its members, and the external boundaries of the EU vary between policy areas (e.g., the internal market, the Schengen area, and the Eurozone). Trade-offs occur regularly between the requirements of an effective and efficient EU boundary governance (through common rules and resources), on the one hand, and the member states' quest for sovereign border control, on the other. In three steps, the project seeks to answer the question how and under which conditions this trade-off has shaped the integration of the EU's external borders. The first module is about theory building. Starting from competence-control theory, it develops assumptions and hypotheses about the integration of the EU's external borders and the conditions under which the boundary configuration shifts in the direction of "competence" or "control". The second module describes and analyses the development of the external boundary governance regime from the 1980s to today. Finally, we conduct a comparative case study analysis that explains the change in boundary configuration in the recent EU crises.