Regional community building in hard times: a dyadic analysis of EU entry restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic

States typically restrict the entry of persons to protect their national communities from external health hazards. This has also been the standard response in the COVID-19 pandemic. In regional governance systems, however, the delineation of the relevant community and the corresponding locus of closure are open and contested issues. Nowhere have these issues been more pressing than in the European Union, a regional organization composed of nation-states and embedded in the liberal international order. Would the COVID-19 pandemic lead to renationalization, a focus on the regional level, or openness to the rest of the world, at least towards fellow liberal-democratic countries? We conceive of border closures as indicators of community building and demarcation. Whereas open borders and mild entry restrictions signal inclusion, closed borders and harsh entry restrictions indicate exclusion. We analyse a novel dyadic dataset of COVID-19-related entry restrictions in five member states to examine community building in the EU. We average entry restrictions across numerous categories of persons and control for pandemic problem pressure, differences in domestic COVID-19 policies, as well as regime similarity. We expect that, after the initial pandemic shock and an immediate return to national community protection, the EU member states engaged in regional community building indicated by low EU-internal and high external entry restrictions. This is even more remarkable as the member states did not shift border closure authority to the EU level but acted upon voluntary coordination. We also examine whether the internal openness of borders has corresponded to and depended on their external closure, thereby shedding light on the connection between internal community building and external community demarcation.