The External Incentives Model (EIM) was designed to explain the Europeanization of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) through the EU's accession conditionality. This article asks how ...relevant the model remains beyond its original context. We examine recent data and research on the EU's impact in two additional contexts: post-accession developments in the CEECs and the Southeast European countries currently in the accession process. We find that the model generally accounts well for the variation in Europeanization across domains and countries. More specifically, the credibility of incentives stands out as a crucial condition for the success of EU conditionality. At the same time, we note omissions and limitations of the original model: first, the model works with highly abstract conditions that require contextual specification to render them more meaningful and better testable. Second, the EIM starts from generally favourable, but underspecified, background conditions.
Up to 2019, Estonia's EU policy and foreign policy were based on a strong domestic political consensus. From April 2019 to January 2021, Estonia was led by a government coalition including a ...Eurosceptic populist party, which brought visible cracks to this consensus. The coalition agreement assured continuity in Estonia's foreign and EU policies, but the statements of some representatives of the coalition repeatedly brought this into question. During the same period, Estonia was faced with external pressure to de-Europeanize: the change and volatility of US foreign policy under Donald Trump put Estonia in a very uncomfortable position, on the one hand, striving to maintain strong relations with its most important security ally, while on the other hand trying to resist the negative impact of Trump's policies on the EU, NATO and multilateral cooperation. This article analyzes the drivers, indicators and consequences of the de-Europeanization of Estonian foreign policy, resulting from these internal and external pressures.
This paper seeks to present a theoretical development of the main lines of research that have addressed the emergence of a European Public Sphere (EPS). To this end, the outcomes of the literature ...are organized into three main categories: political communication in the European Union (EU), the role of digital platforms in a potential public sphere, and the progressive politicization of the EU. Finally, a range of pending challenges are identified. Facing them will help improve research in this field. The increasing politicization of 'Europe' as a topic in the literature and the constant use of digital platforms encourage a European public opinion, which acts together on certain issues beyond the institutional framework. The studies of the coming years have the challenge of combining these variables as well as broadening methodological and theoretical models.
While the EU's impact on member and non-member states has been well researched, we have much less understanding of how Europeanization processes give way to de-Europeanization, a widespread ...phenomenon of the past decade. This paper unpacks and explores the hidden phases and modes of de-Europeanization. I argue that the models of gradual institutional change in historical institutionalism, namely 'layering', 'conversion' and 'drift', operate in different phases of de-Europeanization in a sequential mode. I explore this argument empirically in the domain of regional development policy in Turkey, the longest-standing candidate country. The empirical analysis shows that the mode of 'layering', which involves the addition of new rules without upsetting the existing arrangements, during Europeanization unleashed a subsequent mode of 'conversion', in which new rules were upheld but exploited in implementation. This phase was then followed by 'drift', in which new rules have become irrelevant in the midst of changing circumstances.
The eurozone crisis is commonly associated with a politicization of public debate along national lines. With money being redistributed between member states, national parliamentarians (MPs) seem ...likely to pit national interests against each other. There is, however, an overlooked second force. Interdependence between eurozone states may lead national MPs and their voters to take into account other European Union citizens. Looking at MPs' parliamentary speeches, this article fills a gap by investigating if and under which conditions individual MPs claim to represent Europeanized constituencies during the crisis. The analysis based on original data from a representative claims analysis of plenary debates on the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in Austria, Germany and Ireland reveals such Europeanized representation. Interestingly, being pro-European does not lead to Europeanized representation. Instead, we witness a 'Eurosceptic Europeanization' in that (left-wing) Eurosceptic MPs voice opposition to the crisis measures, but in the name of European citizens.
Research on implementation in the European Union (EU) is characterized by a strong focus on legal conformance with EU policy. However, this focus has been criticized for insufficiently accounting for ...the implications of the EU's multilevel governance structure, thus providing an incomplete picture of EU implementation, its diversity and practice. The contributions of this collection represent a shift towards a more performance-oriented perspective on EU implementation as problem-solving. They approach implementation fundamentally as a process of interpretation of superordinate law by actors who are embedded within multiple contexts arising from the coexistence of dynamics of Europeanization, on the one hand, and what has been termed 'domestication', on the other. Moving beyond legal compliance, the contributions provide new evidence on the diversity of domestic responses to EU policy, the roles and motivations of actors implementing EU policy, and the 'black box' of EU law in action and its enforcement.
Europeanization refers to the process of integrating EU public policy into the domestic discourse and national policy. Two main mechanisms of Europeanization of national policy planning can be ...identified: a soft mechanism characterized by policy transfer and learning, and a hard mechanism determined by the obligation to comply to EU regulations. The aim of the article is to explore these mechanisms of Europeanization within the regional cohesion policy context in Italy. The first will be illustrated by results of PRIN survey on stakeholder awareness of key concepts of European territorial development mainstream; the second mechanism will be showed by the analysis of ROPs elaborated by Italian Regions under ERDF policy process.
In two decades since the Maastricht Treaty, multi-level governance (MLG) has developed as a conceptual framework for profiling the 'arrangement' of policy-making activity performed within and across ...politico-administrative institutions located at different territorial levels. This contribution examines the ways in which the MLG literature has been employed, effectively taking stock of applied research to date. It identifies five main uses of MLG and the different focus of emerging research over time. Considering the most recent scholarship, the contribution explores possible new directions for research, in light of global governance, culminating in a 'bird's eye view' of MLG over 20 years.
Over the past years, the economic crisis has significantly challenged the ways through which social movements have conceptualised and interacted with European Union institutions and policies. ...Although valuable research on the Europeanisation of movements has already been conducted, finding moderate numbers of Europeanised protests and actors, more recent studies on the subject have been limited to austerity measures and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has been investigated more from a trade unions’ or an international relations perspective. In this article, the TTIP is used as a very promising case study to analyse social movements’ Europeanisation – that is, their capacity to mobilise referring to European issues, targets and identities. Furthermore, the TTIP is a crucial test case because it concerns a policy area (foreign trade) which falls under the exclusive competence of the EU. In addition, political opportunities for civil society actors are ‘closed’ in that negotiations are kept ‘secret’ and discussed mainly within the European Council, and it is difficult to mobilise a large public on such a technical issue. So why and how has this movement become ‘Europeanised’? This comparative study tests the Europeanisation hypothesis with a protest event analysis on anti‐TTIP mobilisation in six European countries (Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria) at the EU level in the period 2014–2016 (for a total of 784 events) and uses semi‐structured interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement and policy makers. The findings show that there is strong adaptation of social movements to multilevel governance – with the growing presence of not only purely European actors, but also European targets, mobilisations and transnational movement networks – with a ‘differential Europeanisation’. Not only do the paths of Europeanisation vary from country to country (and type of actor), but they are also influenced by the interplay between the political opportunities at the EU and domestic levels.
This special issue explores to what extent policies and institutions of the European Union spread across different contexts. Are the EU's attempts to transfer its policies and institutions to ...accession and neighbourhood countries sustainable and effective? To what degree do other regions of the world emulate the EU's institutional features; what are the mechanisms of, and scope conditions for, their diffusion? This introduction provides the conceptual framework of the special issue. First, it specifies EU-related institutional change as the 'dependent variable'. Second, it discusses how Europeanisation research and diffusion studies relate to each other and can be fruitfully combined to identify processes and mechanisms by which ideas and institutions of the EU spread. Third, we introduce scope conditions which are likely to affect domestic (or regional) change in response to the promotion or emulation of EU ideas and institutions.
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