Contrary to the wide majority of studies that try to characterise EU external governance by looking at the macro structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss-EU Bilateralism or the ENP have little impact on the modes how the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives.
The concept of external governance seeks to capture the expanding scope of EU rules beyond EU borders. This article elaborates the theoretical foundations of this concept, differentiates the various institutional modes through which external governance takes place and suggests a set of hypotheses addressing the conditions under which EU external governance is effective. Here, we contrast institutionalist explanations, which are the most germane to an external governance approach, with competing expectations derived from power-based theories and approaches emphasizing the role of domestic factors in the target countries.
Traditionally a core aspect of state sovereignty, immigration control has first moved upwards to the intergovernmental sphere. It has then been brought closer to supranational governance, and is now gradually moving outwards towards the realm of EU foreign relations. This article interprets this move as the continuation of established patterns of transgovernmental cooperation in an altered geopolitical and institutional context. It explains internationalisation as a strategy of immigration ministers to increase their autonomy towards political, normative and institutional constraints on policy-making. Whereas these constraints were originally located at the national level, they are now increasingly perceived in communitarising immigration politics. The shift ‘outwards’ may thus be interpreted as a strategy to maximise the gains from Europeanisation while minimising the constraints resulting from deepening supranationalism. Yet this might in the long run also yield a widening of the external migration agenda, distracting it from the original focus on migration control.
The introduction of the principle of mutual recognition in EU justice and home affairs co-operation has been associated with a ‘revolution’ in internal security co-operation and has raised as many expectations as concerns. Whereas most discussions focus on the legal coherence of the concept in third pillar legislation and its potential tensions with procedural law and human rights standards, this article goes two steps back and questions at a more fundamental level the transferability of a principle of market integration into a core area of statehood and analyses the institutional preconditions for its implementation. Juxta- posing the different constellations of interdependence and governance modes in the economic and internal security spheres, it is argued that what functions as an instru- ment of liberalization in one sphere becomes a tool of governmentalization in the other, yet hampered by an unsettled tension between supranationality and states’ prerogatives.
ABSTRACT The creation of the Single European Market has been accompanied by an intense discussion on whether market-creating measures have been privileged over market- correcting ones by the institutional system of the EU. The creation of an ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’ (AFSJ) launched by the Treaty of Amsterdam poses a similar question which, however, has remained heavily under-researched: will the balance between policing competencies and individual rights shift towards the former at the expense of the latter? Recent work on the ‘new raison d’e ́tat’ and the strengthening of national executives in processes of Europeanisation points in this direction. This essay explores the parallels between the Common Market and the AFSJ with regard to the relationship between the structures and substance of governance. The balance between security and individual rights is scrutinised in the main pillars of the AFSJ: asylum cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal matters and police cooperation.
This article explores whether and under what conditions functional sectoral cooperation between the EU and the countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy promotes democratic governance. In an analysis of four countries (Jordan, Moldova, Morocco, and Ukraine) and three fields of cooperation (competition, environment and migration policy), we show that country properties such as the degree of political liberalization, membership aspirations, and geographic region do not explain differences in democratic governance. Rather, sectoral conditions such as the codification of democratic governance rules, the institutionalization of functional cooperation, interdependence, and adoption costs matter most for the success of democratic governance promotion. We further reveal a notable discrepancy between adoption and application of democratic governance in the selected ENP countries that has not been remedied in the first five years of the ENP.
EU external democracy promotion has traditionally been based on ‘linkage’, i.e. bottom-up support for democratic forces in third countries, and ‘leverage’, i.e. the top-down inducement of political elites towards democratic reforms through political conditionality. The advent of the European Neighbourhood Policy and new forms of association have introduced a new, third model of democracy promotion which rests in functional cooperation between administrations. This article comparatively defines and explicates these three models of external democracy promotion. It argues that while ‘linkage’ has hitherto failed to produce tangible outcomes, and the success of ‘leverage’ has basically been tied to an EU membership perspective, the ‘governance’ model of democracy promotion bears greater potential beyond the circle of candidate countries. In contrast to the two traditional models, however, the governance approach does not tackle the core institutions of the political system as such, but promotes transparency, accountability, and participation at the level of state administration.
The deepening of the EU’s acquis communautaire, transformations of the European continent, and intensifying webs of interdependence have, since the 1990s, prompted a progressing blurring of the functional boundaries of the European Union. Whereas the integration project has produced externalities early on, the EU has engaged in an active promotion of its norms and rules beyond the member states, designing concentric circles of flexible ‘EUropean’ integration. This article offers a typology of these evolving external circles of EU rule-export focusing on the European Economic Area, Swiss-EU bilateralism, the stabilization and enlargement policy towards the candidate countries of the Western Balkans, the European Neighbourhood Policy and countries beyond the neighbourhood. Drawing on the theoretical notion of external governance, it will be shown these outer circles of ‘EUropean’ integration fall into three groups. While the first group, the ‘quasi-member states’ of Western Europe, combine far-reaching regulatory alignment with limited opportunities for organizational inclusion in EU structures, the Eastern and Southern neighbours face less legalized forms of rule transfer along with the establishment of parallel regional organizational structures. Links with countries beyond the neighbourhood finally stress the functionally differentiated rather than political and territorial dynamics of EU external governance.
