Intellectual and Political ‘Europe’: Rupture or Continuity in Central Europe?

Abstract

Trying to understand European integration and enlargement without reference to the concept of Europeanization is at best an incomplete process and at worst a fruitless one, especially as there is a growing literature on Europeanization since the 1990s. It is, broadly speaking, a term that is employed to label or describe a process of transformation, but many scholars have also used it as a tool to analyse different aspects of its social reality. Many draw our attention to the development of distinct structures and policy networks in the creation of authoritative European rules, pointing to institutional and policy analysis with a primary focus on domestic organizational structures,¹ while others speak of a process through which the European Union’s (EU) political, social and economic dynamics become part of a domestic discourse, identities, political structures and public policy,² without making any special reference to organizations as such. The latter understanding of Europeanization as a process encompassing cultural, political, psychological and socioeconomic domains seems more useful to explain Europeanization in Central Europe.

I wish especially to thank Stanislav Kirschbaum, Thomas Diez and Kursat Ertugrul for their valuable comments and suggestions.