Revisiting eastern enlargement in the context of extending the border control policy of the EU.

Eastern enlargement of the EU is one of the most ambitious, yet under-theorized, projects the EU has undertaken in its four- decade long history. Accession negotiations between the candidate countries and the EU were far from being an obvious, naturally flowing process. On the contrary, they were characterized by many difficulties and, more often than not, required significant political will to find mutually acceptable compromises. Thus the result, the accession treaty, reflects a certain ambiguity and mismatching purposes. The area of border control policy extension illustrates these tensions particularly well with the lack of lifting border checks on the new internal borders between old and new member states after accession coupled with the enforcement of the new eastern borders of the EU. In the paper I re-examine the incorporation of east European applicant countries into the EU’s border control policy. I adopt a comparative policy design perspective, theorized by Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram , which focuses on the casual link between policymaking processes and subsequent policy designs and emphasizes the importance of different contextual issues within which policy-makers take decisions. Tracing the institutional, political, social and discursive contextual dynamics and translation processes, through which the design of border control provisions of the accession treaty emerges, allows me to identify which specific contextual instances determine the way the Schengen acquis has been extended and clarify why the accession treaty inhibits a degree of inconsistency in the domain of border control policies. The paper is an attempt to re-think EU enlargement from the perspective of border security policy and moves beyond conceptualizations that describe enlargement as a historical or a legal-technical pre-determined process. Instead, I unravel the border control policy measures of the treaty design and re-root them in the environment surrounding the accession talks. Eventually the paper suggests that a different distribution of political power between the EU and the applicants, a different institutional set up of the accession talks and a different social construction of the target population could have produced a radically different accession treaty design that addresses the same problem: the incorporation of candidates to the Schengen acquis, in particular, and the conclusion of EU enlargement, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]