The New European Border and Coast Guard Agency: Pooling Sovereignties or Giving It Up?

In 2016, in the context of a massive inflow of asylum seekers in the EU through the Balkan route, a new European Border and Coast Guard Agency was established by the European Union. The definition of the Agency's scope of intervention bears a surprising mention. Article 19 states that - should a Member State's failure to control its own borders jeopardize the collective effort to monitor the external borders of the Schengen Area - the new Agency could, at the request of the Commission and with the approval of the Council, deploy Border and Coast Guard teams in that Member State to take over the management of border control operations. In other words, this proviso opens the door to the possibility of having European border guards substituting themselves, under exceptional circumstances, to national border guards while the Agency takes the rein at the expense of the Member State at fault. Adopting an approach rooted in border studies, we argue that this hypothetical situation would represent a new step in the bordering of the European Union, bordering being understood here as a social process of differentiation between political communities. An independent border and coast agency with a far-reaching mandate would fundamentally alter the role played by the EU in the ongoing bordering process of the EU. No longer the platform of an intergovernmental debate on the best practices in border management, it would turn the European agency itself into the supranational driving force and central actor at the external borders of the EU. Furthermore, this proviso calls into question the official understanding of EU's border management as relying on a pooling of sovereignties and raises in turn the suspicion that it could grant the EU a very traditional form of sovereignty, mirroring the one prevailing at the national level.