Contrary to the wide majority of studies that try to characterise EU external governance by looking at the macro structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss-EU Bilateralism or the ENP have little impact on the modes how the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives.