How EU Capacity Bargains Strengthen States: Migration and Border Security in South-East Europe

Abstract

How and with what effects have three South-East European countries (Greece, Slovenia and Croatia) responded to the EU’s migration and border security acquis?The paper shows that European integration can strengthen central state actors, but can also change the constellation of actors and resources in trans-boundary policy sectors such as international migration and border security. To demonstrate these effects the paper specifies functional, political and administrative dimensions of the EU’s migration and border security ‘capacity bargain’. It also specifies the limits of an EU approach to migration and border security – and associated capacity-building – that has a strong regulatory focus on the EU’s external frontier swith less attention paid to more complex regulatory and distributive dynamics that arise once migrants are ‘in’.

Acknowledgements

The field work was conducted between December 2007 and April 2009 under the Economic and Social Research Council grant, RES-062-23-0183, Multi-Level Governance in South East Europe, Institutional Innovation and Adaptation in Croatia, Greece, FYR Macedonia and Slovenia. We are very grateful to ESRC for its support for this work. We would also like to acknowledge the important contribution of the researchers who worked with us on this project: Elena Lazarou, Danijel Tomsic and Simona Zavratnik. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Free University of Berlin and at the Conference of Europeanists. We are grateful to participants in those meetings and to two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 .In the full study, interviewees also completed a detailed questionnaire which was then used as the basis for social network analysis to explore in detail these interactions. The capacity bargain is articulated via these social networks but as this paper is concerned with the concept of the capacity bargain, the network maps are not included here, but can be found in Taylor, Geddes and Lees, 2012, 127-162.

2 .Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia have since all been placed on the EU’s visa ‘white list’.