Data, circulation and calculation in EU border enforcement

The condition of possibility of contemporary claims of frictions and divergence between EU and national security concerns with regard to border control is an amnesia of the genesis of EU policy in these areas. In this paper, I examine a specific, historical site where this policy was shaped, the Centre for Information, Discussion and Exchange on the Crossing of Frontiers and Immigration (CIREFI), a working party created in 1992 as part of the new bodies in the EU’s third pillar, and dismantled in 2010. Over the years, CIREFI became one of the early channels through which Member State ministries of the Interior and law enforcement services exchanged statistics, operational information and ultimately electronic personal data, and built joint assessments of the situation at EU external borders. CIREFI, the paper argues, progressively transformed into a centre of calculation where national security concerned were translated into EU concerns, by converting political tensions on the purposes of EU border controls into debates about the means for data circulation and calculation. Building on archival research, the paper demonstrates how, below the threshold of public political controversy over the purpose of EU border control, groups of officials working on behalf of the EU and the Member States progressively recurrently struggled to but ultimately infrastructured routine forms of cooperation by focusing on questions of means rather than ends.