Practices of external control : is there a north-south divide?

Abstract

In the making of the European Union, external border and migration control are key concerns. While uniform legal frameworks have been designed to regulate those policy areas, their implementation is within the remit of Member States. How do national practices translate EU policy on paper? What are the determinants of cross-national differences in policy practice? Do practices of external control support the thesis of a North-South divide within the EU? To reply to those questions, this chapter focuses on the ways in which one European instrument of external control -the Schengen visa policy- is put into action. I use the case of Italy, a southern European country and one of the countries that issues the highest numbers of Schengen visas, to shed light on how and why day-to-day implementation practices challenge national paths as well as the thesis of a divide between Northern and Southern European countries. The analysis focuses on the entanglements of logics on paper, policy narratives and organizational practices while looking at continuities and novelties. It puts forward that the logics and practices governing Italy’s visa policy are historically distant from the EU model, which builds on the Northern countries initiators of the Schengen process. Nevertheless, such a distance diminishes at the stage of the implementation. National boundaries of organizational action are blurred on the ground. Dynamics of policy change are triggered from below.