Security Re-Divided: The Distinctiveness of Policy-Making in ESDP and JHA

In this article, we argue that the premature abolishment of the allegedly anachronistic concepts of internal versus external security is of doubtful heuristic value for the study of security practices. The two domains may gradually converge from the perspective of problems, but do so much less in terms of political practices. We show that security policy is pursued according to different systems of rules. It follows distinct institutional logics. We undertake a systematic comparison of policy-making in the European Union’s Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). It is structured along the distinction between making and implementing an agreement as indicative stages of the policy-making process. First, rule-setting asks how decisions are made in the two domains: with or without the inclusion of external actors. Second, we explore whether the implementation of political decisions involves management or enforcement mechanisms. The empirical results are unambiguous: the political actors follow different systems of rules in the two domains. There are still ‘ideal-typical’ differences in a Weberian sense. This implies that internal and external security may be closely linked, like the opposite sides of the same coin, but must be separated for the purpose of analytical clarity.