Research Papers

The EU is quietly emerging as a significant security actor in its own right. Central to this EU internal security map is a growing role for intelligence-type agencies: EU Home Affairs agencies. These agencies play a central role in the enhanced sharing of information as they gather, process and disseminate information. In the field of internal security particularly, given the traditional resistance to broader delegations of power due to the sensitivity of this field as a core state function and related sovereignty concerns, these activities have traditionally been a defining element of co-operation in this area. While information clearly plays a crucial role in an expanding EU internal security space, we argue that the specificities of this policy area, combined with the manner in which information-sharing takes place in practice to and from EU agencies (but also beyond), give rise to some difficult dilemmas and challenges. Characterised by a traditional and expanding space for ‘secrecy’, dominant principles such as ‘ORCON’ and ‘derivative classification’ as well as a preference for informality and the by-passing of formal structures, pose a considerable challenge to understanding the collection and exchange of information in internal security. Moreover, new institutional attempts at the EU level aimed at streamlining and introducing more consistency into the approach to EU internal security through the creation of a policy cycle on internal security, might accentuate these challenges. We argue that the approach undertaken to date, shrouded in ‘risk’ terminology and with an emphasis on risk assessment as a way to stabilize and legitimize policy-making, in fact obscures the problematic informational basis of the assessments thus produced and which form the basis of future policy on EU internal security. This gives rise to serious drawbacks to EU internal security policy from both a normative as well as a pragmatic/effectiveness perspective.