EU Boundaries in the making: functionalist versus federalist

Abstract

Current debates on the future of the European Union tend to privilege statist perspectives according to which geopolitical challenges and internal politicization either spur disintegration, or drive the EU towards more federalist, centralized and externally bounded features. Starting from the EU's multilevel and polycentric architecture, this article investigates how far such federalist dynamics reach out to task-specific, functionalist EU institutions, such as regulatory agencies. Enjoying a certain degree of autonomy from the EU's central, politically encompassing institutions, regulatory agencies have established close ties with third country regulators to tackle interdependence. Based on the comparative analysis of six regulatory agencies representing varying patterns of international interdependence, sectoral politicization and regulatory authority, we show that functionalist pressure for international cooperation indeed sustains fluid boundaries. However, EU central institutions such as the Commission and the Parliament have increasingly claimed control over agencies' external ramifications. The result is enduring functionalist de-bordering, but federally controlled.

Rebordering Europe: external boundaries and integration in the European Union

“…Discursive rebordering is particularly strong when parties on the cultural right speak about Muslim-majority countries. Lavenex et al (2021) also find that the politicization of an agency's portfolio (in addition to higher agency authority) favours debordering. Most regulatory agencies are so weakly politicized, however, that their boundary configuration follows functional needs rather than communitarian concerns.…”

“…The contributions to this collection do not represent a selection of comparative cases designed to test the analytical framework, but explore a variety of EU bordering issues, actors and processes at different levels: the migration (Kriesi et al, 2021) and Corona pandemic crises (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2021), the preferences of EU citizens in response to the migration crisis (Lutz & Karstens, 2021) and of populist parties on EU defence policy (Henke & Maher 2021), parliamentary discourses on enlargement (Bélanger & Schimmelfennig, 2021), EU regulatory agencies (Lavenex et al, 2021), and EU collective action on defence, migration and the neighbourhood policy (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2021).…”

“…In the same period, the parliamentary discourse on enlargement has remained generally open and based on inclusive framesbut with a marked recent trend towards more negative positions and communitarian frames. In a comparative analysis of EU regulatory agencies, Lavenex et al (2021) find that these functional bodies have retained their flexible and incongruent boundaries with non-member states. However, the Commission and the Parliament have claimed increasing supranational political control over these agencies producing a pattern that they name 'controlled debordering'.…”

Sectoral Governance under the EU's Bilateral Agreements and the Limits of Joint Institutional Frameworks: Insights from EU‐Swiss Bilateralism for Post‐Brexit Relations with the UK

“…Sectoral governance rarely features in research on EU external relations, although a strand of the literature is taking shape that addresses the external relations of EU sectoral bodies such as agencies (Lavenex, 2015; Coman‐Kund, 2018; Hofmann et al, 2019; Lavenex et al, 2021). A key insight provided by this literature is that third‐country access to EU sectoral bodies is essentially limited to policy areas where EU supranational authority is pronounced (Lavenex, 2015; Lavenex et al, 2021, p. 432). This is due to the fact that many EU bodies have emerged from pre‐existing regulatory networks open to third countries.…”

Managing networks: Cohesion and fluidity in EU climate cooperation with European neighbours

“…A distinct strength of our empirical approach is that our dataset distinguishes between adaptation , or the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, and mitigation , which refers to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2022). This distinction enables us to relate our analysis to both of these central pillars of climate policy in the Bali Action Plan of 2007 and in the 2015 Paris Agreement (Liberatore, 2013). Most studies on global climate governance and the EU's external climate governance in the ENP region foreground mitigation, while adaptation as a transboundary policy issue has only recently started attracting scholarly attention.…”