Controlled openness: Control-driven rebordering in the European Union

A recent literature has diagnosed an increasing consolidation of the European Union’s external boundaries, conceptualizing this development as a "rebordering" (Schimmelfennig 2020) of the EU. But how exactly does rebordering in the EU work and how does it compare to historical processes of polity formation? From a Rokkanian perspective, increases in the closure of external boundaries enabled the territorial state to build the resources necessary to later also gain control over them. Political development in the past was therefore closure-driven. In the present-day European Union, this logic is inverted. We demonstrate this by means of a novel dataset which records the development of the EU’s internal and external boundaries for movements of persons between 1980 and 2022. While the external boundaries of the EU have remained largely open since the completion of the single market programme in the early 1990s, with hitherto minor upticks in the past five years, the EU has gained increasing control over its external boundaries since around the year 2000. This development comprises not only legislative and judicial but, crucially, also executive forms of control that affect member states’ exercise of core state powers. EU institutional development over the past 25 years has thus been control- rather than closure-driven. Control-driven rebordering, from a Rokkanian point of view, limits the EU’s potential for resource extraction and political production, and it highlights the persisting differences between historical processes of state formation and contemporary dynamics of European integration