5 - Exchange Without Borders

Summary

The setting up of information systems and the creation of connections between them have now become more or less the lingua franca of modern global governance. It is therefore obvious that information flows do not stop at national borders. As the WRR observed in 1998, information technology undercuts the significance of territorial boundaries. Today, governments are enthusiastically embracing that very feature. The global security drive after 9/11 has played a major role in this, but so has the extent to which the EU Member States have harmonised and coordinated their policies in a whole range of different areas. Information-sharing is important, after all, not only for security reasons; inside the external borders of Europe, it is also helping to complete the internal market and streamline administrative cooperation in many different forms. Although the Netherlands initiates and makes bilateral agreements governing data exchange (for example in 2010 with the United States relating to mutual access to one another's databases for fingerprint and DNA profile matching), the way it uses technology and its attempts to expand information flows are influenced mainly by trends and developments at the European level. There are now a growing number of European databases in which personal data is circulated ‘beyond the borders’, and which are used as a basis for decision-making by administrative bodies in the EU Member States. The scope of these databases is expanding. Such European systems indicate a far-reaching level of integration: government at the European level is also, explicitly, evolving into eGovernment. A further factor is that the EU is also a source of legislation that sets the standard for national eGovernments. Domestic privacy law, for example, is largely derived from European legislation on privacy.

eGovernment applications and arrangements made at EU level have similar features to those at the national level, but their institutional setting is entirely different. Below, we analyse the nature of the EU's databases by looking at the roles and positions of the actors in this setting. The latter are not limited to the formal institutions of the EU, but also include the various actors other and bodies that influence European policymaking.

EUROPEAN INFORMATION DATABASES AND INFORMATION FLOWS

“Neither the Schengen area nor the EU internal market could function today without cross-border data exchange.” Thus begins a Communication by the European Commission, published in mid-July 2010.