The External Governance of EU Internal Security

Abstract This article analyses the modes of governance through which the EU seeks to ensure the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) countries’ participation in the realization of its internal security project. Although the EU, given the strong interdependence in these ‘soft security’ issues, has strong incentives to govern by conditionality in order to ensure the ENP countries’ compliance, efforts to transfer policies by such hierarchical means encounter serious limitations as a result of lack of supranational competence and insufficient incentives that the EU can offer third countries to compensate for adaptation costs. By comparing Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) issues with different degrees of communitarization and representing different constellations of interests in relations with ENP countries, we find that the EU increasingly focuses on the extension of internal transgovernmental networks as an alternative form of external governance. Although theoretically allowing for horizontal patterns of co‐owned cooperation, the integrative potential of these networks is hampered by the lack of mutual trust and institutional incompatibilities in ENP countries. As a result, extended network governance becomes an attempt at unilateral policy‐transfer by ‘softer’ means.