4 April 2025 - 5:20pm
While the EU has denounced US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, it continues to quietly carve up the global economy on its own patch. The bloc has announced that it is beefing up its border security force Frontex, aiming to expand the continental body to 30,000 officers by 2027, up from 10,000 today. It is seen as part of a package to limit so-called “hybrid attacks” on the EU: which might encompass digital intrusions as much as penetrations of the porous borders on the Union’s outer rim.
Yet for all the clamour against Trumpian tariffs and portentous warnings about hybrid attacks from enemy states, it’s not clear that the EU’s larger border force will strengthen the bloc’s actual power. As ever, its policies are driven as much by managing its convoluted internal relations as they are any sober assessment of outside threats.
More than seeing this expansion as an effort to counter threats from hostile militaries, or vast people-smuggling networks, the expansion of Frontex should be viewed ultimately as a power-grab by the Commission. By strengthening the border force, the Commission is expanding the transnational gendarmerie directly under its control. In this increasingly tense geopolitical moment, member states are trying to strengthen their national borders. But the Commission wants to reassert its continued relevance, and through Frontex, the EU is staking its claim to defend its members from a dangerous world. Thus while criticising Trump’s efforts to reshape the global economy, the EU is at the same time constructing a regional fortress, tightening access to its internal markets under the auspices of protecting its citizens.
But however strong Frontex is, it will never be strong enough. This is not merely about numbers. The US Department of Homeland Security has over a quarter of a million employees working for it. The UK employs roughly 10,000 people in its Border Force for a population of just over 68 million (whereas the EU has a total population of roughly 450 million). On the face of it, with only 30,000 employees for a population six times larger than the UK, Frontex would look like the classical liberal ideal: a “night-watchman state”, limited to basic supervisory capacities.
“A national response is not enough,” is the standard EU refrain for legitimating the expansion of its bureaucratic powers, oversight and payroll. The EU may protect the external borders of the Union, but because it is not a sovereign state, whatever protections it may offer to the peoples of Europe will never translate into the kind of protections offered by a nation state. In a democratic nation state, control of national borders is tied to the people’s sovereign control over a particular territory and who governs it.
Europeans have no sovereignty over the EU, meaning that control over Europe’s borders can never be guaranteed by that transnational power. The more the EU asserts its power, the more it alienates the citizens of its member states.
Its lack of democratic legitimacy also means it can never extract the kind of loyalty from Europeans that would actually make it a global contender competing with great powers. The bloc hopes it can prove its strength by firming up its digital and physical battlements against a hostile outside world. But will Europeans accept that? One wonders how long they’ll prefer transnational protection to that offered by their own governments.
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.
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