The Dynamics of Justice and Home Affairs: Laboratories, Driving Factors and Costs

The rapid development of justice and home affairs into a major field of EU policy‐making since the beginning of the 1990s can be explained by a combination of specific ‘laboratories’— which helped pave the way — and ‘driving factors’ which triggered development and expansion. Whereas the Council of Europe, Trevi and Schengen have served as effective laboratories, new or increasing transnational challenges to internal security, Member States' interests in a ‘Europeanization’ of certain national problems and the dynamic of its own generated by the launching of the ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ as a major political project have all acted as major driving forces. Yet the rapid development has also had its price in terms of deficits in parliamentary and judicial control, complexity and fragmentation, an uneven development of the main justice and home affairs policy areas and a tendency towards restriction and exclusion.