Poland’s Eastern border: coping with digital challenges

Poland shares its border with three non-EU states: Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The Polish eastern border is the EU’s external frontier and also delimits the Schengen area. As the European Union is far from being secure and stable being under constant pressure from transnational actors, EU external borders were transformed into security policy areas where high-tech tools, professional management skills and extensive normative measures have been strictly applied. These facts highlight the importance of Poland’s eastern border in terms of EU internal security, migration policy and the management of EU external borders. In this paper Poland’s undertakings in the area of external border control and management will be evaluated and analysed, highlighting technological and organizational solutions applied to improve efficiency and legitimacy of controls at EU external borders and protection of EU territory against threats from outside. The analysis will concentrate on three aspects: (1) Information and data flows; (2) Territorial access; (3) State capacity of integrated border management. A hypothesis may be advanced, on the basis of convergence theory, that Poland’s membership in the EU resulted in modernization push in the field of border control and management bringing about higher security standards with respect to migration flows to the EU. On the other hand, it complicated Poland’s relations with Eastern neighbours and made her looking for more flexible solutions with respect to cross-border cooperation and facilitation of the free movement of people from the adjacent Eastern countries.