The focus of the project has been on developing the EU boundary configurations database. We understand boundaries as functional and spatial institutions regulating the movement of persons and objects across territories. We examine 18 functional boundaries for the entry and exit of persons (such as workers, refugees, students, and military personnel) and 32 functional boundaries for the entry and exit of objects (such as industrial goods, personal data, audiovisual content, and arms) representing a broad variety of boundaries. For each functional boundary, we code the level of closure (how easy is it to cross the boundary?) and control (how much legislative, executive, and judicial authority does the EU exercise over the boundary?) for the internal boundaries of all member states, and for their external boundaries with the countries of the neighbourhood and with several important distant countries (like the US, China, Japan, and India). The dataset covers the period since 1980 and is based on the manual analysis and coding of the relevant EU law.
The dataset is a starting point for describing and explaining the political development of the EU. It also allows us to compare the development of the EU against the historical development of the modern state and against the expectations of major theories of state building and regional integration. We are interested in how external factors such as democratization and democratic backsliding, geopolitical rivalries, and security threats as well as internal factors such as the politicization of European integration affect boundary formation. We also examine how the specific features of the EU as a "regulatory polity" built on top of existing nation-states have shaped its boundary and polity formation trajectory. We look at the relationship between closure and control, internal and external boundaries, and differences between boundary closure and control for exit and entry as well as for the movement of persons and objects.
Our descriptive analyses show that the EU has increasingly gained authority over the boundaries of the member states. We further observe that whereas EU control of both internal and external boundaries has increased, a persistent gap between higher EU control of internal as opposed to external boundaries has remained. EU bordering is internally driven. And whereas boundary control has increased in all dimensions (legislative, judicial, and executive), legislative and judicial control are dominant, and executive control has lagged behind. We further find that boundary control for objects has remained persistently higher than for persons. As for closure, we find the increasing gap between internal and external closure expected by state-building theories, but the development has been driven by internal opening rather than by increasing external closure. We also find that EU external boundary closure has become increasingly differentiated in the post-Cold War period. According to current state of our research, closure is mainly an expression of community building: the more "European" and the more democratic countries are, the more the EU opens its boundaries. By contrast, the increase in supranational external boundary control is the result of a functional and constitutional "spillover" of internal boundary control. We find that EU bordering is much in line with the political development of a liberal-democratic regulatory polity.
