The Role of EU Agencies in the Management and Guarding of Borders in the EU

Research Focus and Methodology 

Aida researches how EU agencies foster administrative integration in the EU Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. Her research tests the hypothesis that EU agencies, as institutionalized structures that coordinate administrative cooperation, can transform the EU political-administrative order to the benefit of an increasingly integrated administration. The emerge of such integrated administration in sensitive policy areas such as security and migration has direct consequences vis-à-vis the end-users of border policies (virtually all people on EU soil and all people wishing to reach it), but also in regard to the democratic fundamentals (balance of powers, accountability and legitimacy of public power, etc.) on which the Union is based. Methodologically, the research combines literature research, legal and document analysis, and semi-structured expert interviews with EU and national staff working in or in connection with the EU agencies under consideration. In dialogue with EU law, specialized administrative law, political science, and public administration scholarship, Aida’s monograph investigates the effects of agencification dynamics on EU governance models.

Relation to Borders 

European frontiers have constituted a major challenge for border studies scholars since the introduction of the ideas of free movement and a borderless Europe. The conception of borders itself evolved from plain physical limits -in Westphalian/geopolitical terms-, to complex post-national and all too often immaterial concepts. The actual guarding of traditional frontiers represents only a tiny portion of today’s border management machinery, along with activities addressing transnational crime, migration flows, trade, security issues, etc. Next to states as the (historically) principal agents, inter-, supra-, and sub-national entities substantially contribute to the tangible and intangible molding of European borders. Aida researches how these new actors and modes of governance shape EU frontiers and their management. 

Findings and Takeaways 

Disparate conceptualizations of shared administration hinder understanding across disciplines and make it difficult to establish a common theoretical baseline for studying administrative integration in the EU. In her monograph, Aida differentiates between two models of shared administration in the EU, capturing the main differences found in existing scholarly analyses. She finds that EU agencies provide the impetus and coordination needed to depart from a simple shared administration based on partition of tasks and powers, to the path towards an integrated administration. Even in intergovernmental areas, the progressive empowerment of agencies allows not only for more and more policies being discharged by means of composite procedures, but also for deep administrative integration such as joint generation of information and joint policy execution stricto sensu. However, each policy area displays different degrees of both politicaladministrative morphologies: the actual configuration of the administration results from a compromise between separation and integration incentives, whereby the EU and its Member States continuously negotiate the confines of common border and migration policies.

Researcher: Aida Halilovic (see profile)

Supervisors: Ellen Vos, Lilian Tsourdi, Sevasti Chatzopoulou (see profiles)