New Sovereign Borders

For decades, the borders the European Union drew were primarily economic. Today, they are increasingly political. Foreign investment screening, the regulation of foreign subsidies, anti-coercion instruments, the carbon border adjustment, due diligence obligations: these do not merely defend a level playing field. They protect critical infrastructure, guard against third- state-backed capital and shield the EU’s internal policy space from external coercion.

The customs union mediated commercial interests that Member States were broadly willing to delegate. The new bordering instruments reach somewhere else entirely. They extend into security, public health, energy supply, defense procurement: domains states have long regarded as part of their sovereign core. The point is not that this was absent from the Treaties, but that it has now become practice. 

The pandemic was a catalyst. The vaccine purchase and export mechanism made public health an EU-level site of external re-bordering. In turn, internal de-bordering dismantled national barriers to critical goods. Energy solidarity now requires that decisions on gas supply in one country be assessed for their effects on neighbors. In the Opal case, the Court gave legal tenor to energy solidarity by requiring a relational assessment of the interests involved: the upscaling of a Union-wide interest in energy security did not dispense with taking into account the interests of specific Member States liable to be affected, notably Poland. New instruments of common defense procurement pool demand across states that had not traditionally shared an ammunition supply chain. Interests that once justified national derogations from free movement are now being recast in terms of collective European action. Sovereignty is not disappearing. It is being reconfigured.

Harnessing Collective Weight

Externally, the EU raises barriers. Internally, it lowers them by creating unitary frameworks that harness the collective political weight and market power of Member States and their close partners. Joint purchasing, coordinated screening, harmonized controls are institutional structures designed to reinforce core state functions and build leverage. These developments go beyond classical market integration. They suggest a more demanding form of cooperation, one in which Member States are asked to act together not simply to liberalize exchange, but to develop capacity and scale.

Sovereignty here undergoes a relational reconfiguration. Each Member State is obliged to account for the interests of the others. Screening in one capital must weigh vulnerabilities across borders. Solidarity in energy means no state can hoard supply while a neighbor’s infrastructure falters. The result is more ambiguous than a simple transfer of power to common institutions: sovereignty is constrained in some instances and reinforced in others. 

There is, however, a danger closer to home. EU re-bordering instruments that rely on Member State structures can trigger unwelcome re-bordering within the Union itself among the Member States. Regressive tendencies of Member States risk being awakened. 

Beyond the Wall

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Gramsci wrote. An interregnum of this sort characterizes European integration today. Continuity of supply, infrastructural security and common preparedness are becoming central concerns of this new phase.

But bordering is a process, not a destination. A polity cannot be built through screening, stockpiling and exclusion alone. It is also built by deciding how burdens and benefits are shared. If Europe now seeks safety in common infrastructures, energy and defense, it must also face the distributive questions such projects raise.

The recent turn is not only defensive. It may also help consolidate the EU as a polity, by requiring Member States to treat certain vulnerabilities and capacities as European rather than merely national. And yet economic support is not the same as political solidarity. The former seems to have advanced further than the latter.

That is where the present turn may still wane. The EU can create new instruments more easily than it can create lasting consent for their deployment. The legal tools are arguably developing faster than the solidarity needed to sustain them. Yet that solidarity is no longer absent; it has begun to take institutional shape, however partial and contested. The question is whether these new borders remain merely defensive lines, or whether they also help shape a wider order beyond them.