The past 20 years, since the 1992 Treaty on European Union, have seen the gradual creation of both an “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice” and a “Common Foreign and Security Policy”. More recent is the development of a “European Neighbourhood Policy” over the past 10 years. All three of these policies involved the navigation and negotiation of security, borders and governance in and by the European Union (EU). This article analyses these practices of bordering and governance through a five-fold security framework. The article argues that a richer understanding of EU security discourses can be achieved through bringing the five dimensions to the analysis and using them to study both the interlinking and the interweaving of security, bordering and governance. Overall, the analysis presented here suggests that the five dimensions of broadening, deepening, thickening, practice and being can all contribute to a more expansive understanding of how EU security in the 2000s has been related to bordering and governance processes, and how these have been increasingly interwoven within the EU.