From the global financial crisis via the migration crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic to the Russian war on Ukraine: recent developments highlight how strongly European integration is challenged by events at or beyond the EU’s external borders. Yet current theorizing of European integration focuses almost exclusively on internal factors. EUROBORD therefore engages in a ‘bordering’ analysis aiming to describe and explain how ‘boundary shocks’ shape the trajectory of European integration.
EUROBORD understands boundary configurations as markers of political development. EU boundary closure – how permeable boundaries are for the movement of persons and products – is an indicator of exclusive or inclusive community building. Boundary control – to what extent the EU gains the authority to regulate and the resources to enforce boundaries – is an indicator of centralized or decentralized capacity building. Analyzing EU boundary closure and control helps us understand the nature of the EU polity and its development.
How does the EU react to shocks to its external boundaries? What drives the opening or closure of EU boundaries? When and why has the EU reinforced its supranational boundary management capacities – and under which conditions have member states reasserted control over their borders? Do transboundary crises strengthen EU polity formation? These are the questions that EUROBORD seeks to answer in a comparative analysis of bordering processes and by developing a ‘bordering theory’ of European integration.
To this end, EUROBORD builds a boundary configuration dataset. It measures closure and control for a large variety of economic, political, cultural and coercive boundaries for the movement of persons and products between European states and their neighbors, from 1980 to today. EUROBORD examines how boundary gaps (asymmetries between member and nonmember states at the external boundaries of the EU) and boundary shocks (disruptive changes in cross-boundary movements) affect the performance of the EU and its member states. Further subprojects study the politicization and politics of bordering at different levels: citizens’ perceptions and preferences, party discourse and competition, and intergovernmental conflict and negotiations.