The politics of subterfuge and EU JHA governance capacity

This paper starts out from a puzzle: Why is EU JHA characterized by frustrations and blockades, while it is at the same time one of the most dynamic policy-areas?

Posed in such general terms, this question is almost impossible to answer: Not only is EU JHA policy a highly diverse, but has also seen phases of ambitious agenda-setting contrasted by periods of stagnation. Therefore, a convincing answer to the above puzzle would require an extensive historical exposition of this policy area, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Here I only intend to review some general factors that inform EU’s current governance capacityin JHA, giving particular emphasis to the problems posed by unanimous decision-making in the Third Pillar. This structuralist approach cannot explain any particular instances of EU JHA policy-making on its own, but it aims to inform subsequent case studies.

The paper proceeds in four steps. In a first part, I will discuss the EU’s structural obstacles to unanimous decision-making from a rationalist perspective. For this purpose I draw heavily on the work of Fritz Scharpf (1997) and Adrianne Héritier (1999) who have introduced many useful insights from comparative politics and policy analysis into EU studies. In the second part, I will survey different strategies for successful policy-making under extensive structural constraints to account for the dynamic development of EU JHA policy in recent years. This overview will be broken down into the classic dimensions of policy, polity and politics. In the third part, I will briefly review two recent articles that on EU governance in JHA and «internal security» and show how many of their observations can be fitted into the overview developed in the second part. Moreover I will briefly point to the fact that in these recent analyses the «politics» dimension is perhaps somewhat underemphasized. The conclusion points out that enhancing JHA governance capacity in the face of extensive constrains comes at a price, such as institutional fragmentation, selective policy frames or an overly ambitious crisis-driven policy-making, while the implementation records remains also questionable.

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The politics of subterfuge and EU JHA governance capacity