Description
The relationship that the United Kingdom and the European Union have built since 1992 is one of the most interesting in the field of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), a policy area characterised by differentiated integration (Svendsen and Adler-Nissen, 2019) and variable geometry (Usher, 1997). The introduction of the Justice and Home Affairs Pillar led to the emergence of a UK-EU relationship articulated around notions of exceptionalism and based on the selective participation of the UK in EU JHA cooperation instruments such as the European Arrest Warrant or Europol (Carrapico et Al., 2019). Such relationship has been fundamental, not only in the construction of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, but also in its external dimension, which has gradually become one of the most important areas of EU external relations (Monar, 2017; Carrapico and Trauner, 2012). Since the Brexit referendum, however, policy discussions have focused on the way this relationship is expected to evolve, leading not only to changes in UK-EU internal security cooperation, but also to shifts in EU external relations. In practice, the planned UK-EU security agreement entails the loss of a Member State that plays a central security role in JHA and its shift to the external dimension. The current paper proposes to explore the impact that Brexit governance is having on the external dimension of Justice and Home Affairs by focusing on two elements: 1) the changing identity of the external dimension of JHA and the perceptions of what is politically, legally and diplomatically possible in the context of the UK-EU future security relationship, and 2) what the specific case of the external dimension of JHA has to say about the impact of Brexit on EU external relations.
