Muddling through with black swans circling cverhead: border official’s perspective on border security in EU

Abstract

This paper discusses the results of two focus group discussions with managing officers within the European border guarding community. Frontex - EU’s executive border and coast guard agency conducts multiple activities, which involve member-state officers in various forms. In one of these Frontex format we have identified a group of officers and officials who have extensive professional experience at both national and European levels of border security policy and enforcement. In our study we find that the perception of European border security challenges closely related to how these officers see EU integration overall. For the officers it is clear that effective external border security enforcement requires further policy harmonization and there is alignment of views how that can be achieved. At the same time the officers take a mostly fatalistic stance towards the political feasibility of overcoming many of the hurdles. The key hurdles that discussions have identified are: (i) a lack of political agreement on what the endgame of integration is, (ii) opaque motivation of national and European political decision-makers towards border security policy, and (iii) resource misallocation. EU border security is one of the two flagship EU integration projects that show a global political ambition and constitute key hallmarks at the same time causing challenges that current EU institutions find hard to tackle with. Assuming that neither federalization, nor a retreat from the Schengen agreement will occur this paper discusses what border security management models are feasible within the existing institution constraints and the findings from the focus group discussions, offering a contribution to the theory European administrative space from a street-level bureaucracy perspective.