Competence and control in EU boundary governance: from rules to resources?

The European Union has traditionally been described as a regulatory state – strong on legislative and judicial competences for making binding rules but weak on executive competences and resources. However, recent developments – from the building of fiscal capacity through the European Stability Mechanism and the European Central Bank to the current plans to contribute to financing Europe’s rearmament – suggest a gradual reconfiguration of the EU’s polity model. In this paper, we examine the development of the EU’s resource equipment for boundary governance. We suggest a framework and hypotheses based on competence-control theory. We start from the assumption that functional factors related to EU authority, boundary characteristics and boundary shocks generate demand for competence-driven resource centralization in a domain generally dominated by national control. Empirically, the paper builds on the EUROBORD dataset covering a large variety of internal and external functional boundaries since the 1980s and on a combination of regression and survival analyses. Our results show that the centralization of resources is strongly associated with the centralization of legislative and executive authority in boundary governance. We also find that the member states are more hesitant to pool and delegate resources for the governance of external boundaries than for the governance of internal boundaries. However, if external boundaries are comparatively closed, regulate entry or concern the movement of persons, the level of resource centralization is higher at external boundaries. Finally, resource centralization has further increased in response to boundary shocks during the recent crises of the EU. These findings point to a pattern of selective and reactive centralization in the EU, driven by both institutional logics and contingent pressures. Our analysis contributes to understanding the evolving executive dimension of the EU regulatory state and highlights how functional demands and crisis responses reshape the allocation of supranational capacity across boundaries.