Agency Governance in the AFSJ: How EU Agencies interact in EU Border Management

Abstract

Academic literature revolving around Frontex has mushroomed over the last years. Since its inception legal and political science scholarship has dealt with numerous aspects of Frontex including its emergence, legitimacy, legalization and the practice of external border control. What has received less attention, however, is how Frontex has interacted with other EU agencies. It is the main objective of this paper to analyse the various forms of horizontal interactions between these various agencies and ask whether these relations have either enhanced a security-obsessed “Fortress Europe” or, conversely, strengthened a human rights-promoting EU as a ‘Union of Values’. Relying on rationalist and constructivist accounts, we conceive interagency interaction as a way to strengthen the effectiveness as well as the legitimacy of agency action. Empirically, the paper assesses the relations of Frontex with other agencies that pursue, roughly spoken, either security goals (Europol) or human rights objectives (Fundamental Rights Agency, European Asylum Support Office)