Talk the talk, or walk the walk? Changing narratives in Europeanization research

Between the Real World Process and the Object of Research

Since the first mention of the term ‘Europeanization’ in the sense of ‘adjusting to Europe’, much has been written using the term.^[2] Regardless of the extreme diversity in this field, conclusive results on what Europeanization is and, even more so on how it works are few and far between. Europeanization studies is a ‘broad church’ with sub-groups of scholars focussing on the incorporation of European rules, norms and values into the domestic arenas in a host of states: in old and new member states, future and contemporary candidate countries, as well as in states of the European neighbourhood. If anything, this demonstrates the conceptually untidy use of Europeanization as an outcome of supranational steering processes on domestic policies in states with above average exposure to EU pressures. Remarkably, whereas Frank Schimmelfennig originally proposed to deploy Europeanization as a tool for explaining the ‘real’ impact of EU membership on domestic change in candidate countries, today’s understanding among scholars is no longer limited to the direct impact of the EU.^[3]

The latest research relies on Europeanization not as a tool for explaining the top-down incentives for change, but rather for exploring the degree of domestic alignment in politics, policies and politicking with the ‘European standard’. The process of political change in candidate and neighbouring countries to the EU, brought about by ‘adjusting to Europe’, has created different perceptions on the ground about ‘Europe’ itself. This, at times, has led to indirect changes in political preferences, political elites’ relationships with their societies and of societies themselves that have moved into unanticipated directions and at different speeds. Yet more often than not, it is the indirect and unforeseen impact of future changes in polities that is reflected in the studies of the role domestic actors increasingly play when it comes to the Europeanization of their own states. It is unsurprising therefore, that the focus on the direct and limited effects of EU involvement that were in high currency a decade ago are no longer en vogue.

The prior focus of Europeanization debates on the top-down impact that international institutions had on domestic political developments, has at the present juncture yielded space to concerns over alternative tools for driving domestic change. Many have also been blinded by ideological visions of European organisations as a force for positive change, with little depth in assessment of the nature that change might assume once Europeanization pressures abate.^[4] The recent heightened awareness about the impact domestic institutions and actors have exercised in the process of the approximation of national policies and political process to (perceived) European ones only further demonstrate how Europeanization is an emotive rather than a factual point of reference.

The underlying normative understanding of Europeanization is omnipresent in the study of the (notional) impact of ‘Europe’ on member states, as well as candidate and neighbourhood countries. These reproduce the discourse on the positive and irreversible impact on domestic policy and political choices of Europeanization. In this context, the recent trend to engage with bottom-up Europeanization is evident in the literature. This is particularly the case with studies of Turkey, which stress the influence domestic factors have on dynamic change (or absence thereof), especially since the EU has been showing dwindling interest in this country’s accession.^[5] It remains unclear whether domestic rather than supranational factors are driving reforms outside the EU, in particular as regards Turkey, but also in Ukraine and the wider MENA region. However, these factors are often challenged in discussions on the de-Europeanization of Turkey,^[6] but also of backsliding of new member states^[7] and the lack of progress in the accession of Macedonia and Bosnia.^[8]

These approaches, grappling with sets of complex and interdependent changes in domestic politics, are solidly grounded in the literature on transforming governance before accession. They have also spawned (and subsequently promoted) studies of ‘diffusion mechanisms’. For example, Börzel and Risse, as well as Jetschke and Lenz all focus on Europeanization as a process of diffusion, comprising both direct and indirect transformations in the polities they study.^[9] However, while this empirically rich research maps vectors of domestic change onto the potential expectations of the EU from its member states, much of this research suffers from insufficient theoretical grounding of the causalities observed. At times, political change is promulgated by the domestic, at others by supranational actors (as indirect mechanisms involving change), while in other instances changes are initiated by representatives of domestic institutions as in the case of indirect mechanisms of diffusion.^[10] Although empirically insightful, such explanations should not be seen as analytically inspired studies of a Europeanization process as they are useful for what they are: post-factum descriptions of outcomes.

Similarly, another focus of research has been on domestic governance processes as alternatives to European conditionality.^[11] In part, the reference to the spatial dependency of countries undergoing similar interactions with the EU, and among each other, has been brought up in debates on both accession and neighbourhood Europeanization in the past. In focussing on illustrative analogies, such as the ‘regatt a principle’ (i.e. candidate countries’ competition with each other in the race to EU membership), or ‘competitive learning’ (i.e. a candidate’s engagement with the enlargement process), these studies place emphasis on choices made by domestic political elites in existing domestic institutional contexts.^[12] Similar references to the impact of external illiberal actors on domestic political choices as powerful breaks for democracy promotion^[13] drag attention away from the role of the EU and its institutions in the process of Europeanization.^[14]

In this context, we find studies of sectoral cooperation between the EU and neighbourhood countries that are linked to formalised European frameworks for direct and indirect democracy promotion. This segment of the contemporary Europeanization literature usually stands apart from comparative regionalism studies with a specific focus on the EU.^[15] And yet, both engage with processes of transformation in non-EU states that are either geared towards sets of domestic factors, or by means of external incentives to converge with the norms of the so-called ‘European model’ of governance.^[16] Such an understanding of Europeanization in both the ‘diffusion literature’, and in the regional-focussed research explains the transformation towards a more ‘European model’, explicitly as an outcome by tapping into various—in part unrelated—factors. Such a broad understanding of Europeanization shows the powerful appeal of the term as a substitute for a toolbox containing multiple explanatory paradigms, but one which rarely sets out the conditions for, or indeed the timeframes of the concept’s effectiveness in individual case studies. It appears, therefore, that more recent changes in Turkey, the lack of progress on the road to Europe in Ukraine, and the stalled progress of accession for Western Balkan countries, should result in a comprehensive revision of the uses of Europeanization. This may either involve greater attention to discourses constitutive of the social and political reality in accession and potential candidate countries, or towards a self-referential discourse that masks the lack of progress made in real-world politics.

All of this gives past research a distinct civilisational tinge that posits domestic factors as obstacles for domestic change, and international involvement as a driver for domestic alignment with the EU and its pivotal member states.^[17] Much of the resultant scholarship has engaged in counterfactual reasoning on actor strategies in the domestic politics of candidate and potential candidate countries, despite successfully disentangling core explanatory domestic factors from domestic perceptions of loosely defined European norms.^[18] It seems that despite bottom-up as well as the so-called ‘bottom-up-down’ process-tracing and careful analysis of reasoning put forward by domestic actors, many scholars have engaged with political, as well as scholarship discourses on Europeanization, rather than with Europeanization proper.

The period of the EU’s Eastern enlargement laid the groundwork for expediting the differentiation between the discourses on Europeanization and its real-world impacts on a wide range of research outputs exploring the (then perceived to be real) effects of the EU on candidate countries. During this period of time, the theme of ‘Eastern enlargement’ emerged as a distinct sub-field of the ‘Europeanization of candidate countries’,^[19] although at all times building upon the earlier work on ‘membership Europeanization’. While useful, Europeanization during the period of Eastern enlargement demonstrated vividly that some of the past trends related to the differential impact of the EU on candidate countries were still valid, the focus lay squarely on the impact of conditionality in the East of Europe.^[20]

The literature on Eastern accession Europeanization research has relied heavily on top-down, EU-driven adaptation pressures while treating domestic factors such as adjustment costs, the role of veto players, and support from the domestic opposition, as change-hindering intervening variables.^[21] Much of this scholarship relied on research designs that undervalued the intervening domestic conditions as either positive, or negative factors in adopting the rationale of the EU. Rarely have domestic factors been viewed as facilitating change outside the narrowly prescriptive EU framework for institutional readjustment. Although accurate to a degree, this research has overrated the ability of the EU to enforce top-down change while being culpable of neglecting alternative routes to desired outcomes of policy change in the run-up to EU membership.^[22]

In contrast to the aforementioned trend in the literature at the time, a few scholars adopted alternative perspectives to demonstrate the independent impact of the ‘domestic’ on the (still ill-defined) outcomes of Europeanization, such as with voluntary forms of policy emulation in candidate—and to some extent also in potential candidate—countries.^[23] Despite the fact that the most peculiar cases in the Eastern European accession process ‘lay at the borderline between domestic choice and EU-induced rule adoption’,^[24] the transformative power of Europe has remained the dominant theme.

The pull of the EU on countries with favourable domestic political conditions has been of interest to the largest section of the scholarship.^[25] Only time will tell if, in the aftermath of the current multiple European crises, this scholarship has also exploited ‘the European factor’ as a deus ex machina for the literature at large.^[26] For example, Radaelli^[27] has suggested that so little of the EU’s agency in the process of domestic change has led to biased accounts of it as a result of the downgrading of domestic factors to hindering (yet at all times, unsystematic) interventions.

While both ‘membership’ and ‘accession’ Europeanization literatures demonstrated the transformative power that the EU can have on domestic politics, the extent of domestic change has remained differential, indicating that more attention should have been paid to institutional changes ahead of EU accession. As such, cases which have considered the role domestic factors have played in the process of change have remained scarce and, in our view, neglectful of one central theme in the real-life changes often perceived to represent the same package of Europeanization processes: the process of state-building in candidate countries.

In fact, this very notion has been obscured by parallel societal processes across the wider European region. As social pressures mounted on national political elites to align domestic practices with those observed (usually, from afar) in the EU member states, the reference to the Europeanization of public spaces has entered public debate. For example, in the aftermath of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the contestation of political representation in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, and the multiple popular mass protests in the Western Balkans, copious reference to Europeanization has been made. In these instances, the publics of the ‘lesser consolidated democracies’ waiting in the accession queue voiced demands for greater direct involvement of the EU in domestic political processes. However, as can still be observed in the case of Macedonia’s Colourful Revolution, public outrage has (so far?) not resulted in speedier EU accession processes, nor has it resulted in the anticipated change of closer cooperation between Macedonia and the EU.

Popular demand for tighter EU controls over domestic political elites has, however, resulted in the growing interest of the EU itself in promoting and emphasising the importance of civil society as a pivotal stakeholder in the process.^[28] Yet, the direct influence of the EU in candidate and neighbourhood countries has been limited and came, yet again, to signify the potential for European organisations to pressure policymakers in candidate countries not via ‘carrots and sticks’ but through oversight by grassroots organisations. As a result, we increasingly see scholarly studies on the Europeanization of civil society as tools that facilitate people-to-people networks in support of societal transformations, and usher in grounds for political change in the medium-term. Yet, this scholarly debate takes grassroots understandings of and demands for the (perceived) European rules and policies seriously, and not the sets of still ill-defined European norms as their analytical tools.

From the start, the EU’s initiatives towards its neighbours have been subject to criticism on a variety of grounds, but mainly referring to the inherent weakness of top-down policy delivery. This has contributed to partial and selective analysis of the reasons for the successes and failures of reforms on the ground, in both member states and candidate countries, and presently also in neighbourhood countries.^[29] These have reflected the increasingly complex nature of the EU itself, but also of the decisions and crucially policymaking processes in the states targeted by the European Union proper.

Taking Stock of Europeanization Research

Looking back over two decades of Europeanization research, the 2004 enlargement round has been a watershed in the scholarship. While the growing number of EU member states has been of help for theorising different vectors in the EU’s and its member states’ choices, the assessment of the toolbox of policy preferences and their differential outcomes across countries and issue areas has become much more vague. For instance, the recent analyses by Börzel demonstrate convincingly that governments in the Southern Caucasus have effectively instrumentalised the EU’s priorities and only selectively adopted reform packages that could be adjusted to their domestic preferences.^[30] Likewise, in Ukraine and in Moldova some progress has been observed as regards the early stages of launching reforms, but changes in many areas have remained selective and partial, much like in the MENA region where initial commitment to reform was only matched by their frustratingly limited implementation.^[31]

Despite the announced new approach of the EU towards its neighbouring countries, the ‘new’ element therein is highly debatable with ‘less of the same’ describing the limited change in practice towards neighbouring countries and less funding disbursed to target potential candidate countries.^[32] More specifically, Noutcheva attests little change in the ENP goals on mobility and migration, conflict management, and economic development. Conversely, she identifies only minor changes in democracy, described as ‘deep and sustainable’, and complimented with being a ‘universal value’ for the EU and its neighbourhood.^[33] Her analysis suggests that both the goals and instruments of the ENP before and after the Arab Spring identify a growing gap in the rhetorical and factual commitment to the promotion of democracy (as well as on sanctioning relapse), despite growing emphasis on diplomatic involvement of the EU in its neighbourhood.^[34] The emphasis on ongoing political reform as a precondition for economic support has been embedded in the ‘more-for-more’ approach introduced in 2011 that has sought to strengthen democratic governance and entrench democratisation processes across European neighbourhood countries.^[35] But while, on the practical level, the EU has modified policies towards non-members several times, some observers have claimed that the lessons of the Arab Spring have been the driving force behind this, rather than of past experiences with Europeanization.^[36]

As in Noutcheva’s work,^[37] much of the criticism expressed by the scholarship on Europeanization, however, has come from those who demonstrate the lack of fit between candidate countries’ abilities to live up to the requirements of reform as projected by the EU, and the EU’s own commitment to reward countries’ successful implementation of it.^[38] The lack of a parsimoniously defined—or indeed, an agreed upon notion of what European norms should do, not to mention what they are—have added an extra level of difficulty when outlining the potential impacts of the ENP on target countries. As Melo notes, the ENP is ‘neither enlargement, nor foreign policy’ and as such does not possess instruments or leverage vis-à-vis potential candidate countries.^[39] Therefore, despite its distinct position among the sets of European initiatives, the ENP has been thought of—and indeed written about—as a part of the EU’s enlargement process, assessed in terms of its efficiency to promote change in the neighbourhood. This has been dissected into different dimensions in the scholarship since the evolution of the differentiated approaches to ENP countries, such as the Black Sea Synergy in 2008 and the Eastern Partnership in 2009.

Regrettably, we are unable to find realist accounts of reasons for the EU’s own over-ambitious priorities on a range of issue areas (such as e.g. democracy promotion), or of the weakness of domestic embrace of the external norms. Equally, while the tensions between the EU and its member states about joint ownership of policy developments have been readily identified in research, there has been little written on joint actions to overcome the asymmetrical design of policies such as the ENP. This is largely because of a difference in ambitions among ENP countries, as well as a result of powerful tools in the hands of the Commission to offer all the benefits bar formal membership status to countries like Ukraine and Turkey.

Considering the horizons for research on the ENP, scholars have focussed on processes inside and outside the EU to converge largely on the positive outcomes achieved. This is done in variety of ways. For example, when one adopts a more comprehensive outlook for exploring changes in European neighbourhood countries under the pressure of the so-called illiberal regional heavyweights like Russia and China, societal factors are increasingly drawn into the explanatory matrix. This adds rather than reduces the complexity of explanation.^[40] At the same time, the role of wider sets of dependencies is such that embeddedness in global economies and reliance on aid,^[41] tutelage by the international financial donors,^[42] and the restrictive oversight by the Council of Europe (CoE) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),^[43] have all been added to the list of explanatory factors.

These studies underscore that global issues are at work in countries that are undergoing the process of Europeanization, yet whether changes are the result of, or indeed exclusive to Europeanization has not been addressed systematically. The studies cited all build upon the earlier findings on country- and/or sector-related conditions that allow transgovernmental policy networks to maintain resilience in the light of external pressures,^[44] but whether these networks operate thanks to—or maybe despite—Europeanization is less clear. As we have outlined above, we believe many of the ideas in the research are indebted to earlier debates on the role of ‘domestic factors’ forming the preferences of governments in European neighbouring countries,^[45] policy-specific conditionality,^[46] impact of liberalisation on political stability,^[47] and the effectiveness of externally set provisions for domestic actors.^[48] Scholarly attention, during and immediately after the Eastern enlargement, has postulated rather than synthesised knowledge on the impact of European factors on (new) member states.^[49] The fact that this notional impact is still labelled ‘Europeanization’ is largely due to differences in the outcomes of domestic political process and policymaking across the set of countries.

Exploring the impact of Europeanization on domestic change, therefore, lacks sequential theorising on the reasons for difference, as well as on the mechanics of Europeanization. Much of the scholarship agrees that during the period of Eastern enlargement two explanations have been useful to outline pathways in domestic change: one positing the rational choice of political actors in candidate countries who have been enticed to change now in exchange for benefits later, and another placing political institutions into a prominent position to steer change into the direction perceived to be appropriate and necessary. Not only have these two explanations emphasised the pivotal role of different actors (political elites and political institutions respectively), but also the sustainability of political change (superficial and deep respectively). They also have variegated explanations of domestic buy-in, thus ensuring the irreversibility of Europeanization.

In fact these two explanations for the different paths of Europeanization tail back to the differential impact of the EU on political institutions which have been widely explored in the first-generation literature that focussed on member states’ Europeanization. The Eastern enlargement Europeanization scholars, on the other hand, have systematically marginalised an institutions-focussed perspective. Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) provided a laboratory for scholars to explore the short-term impact of external pressures—or conditionality—in candidate countries and as such welcomed rational choice models for explanation. In the context of state-building and societies undergoing consolidation around the newly erected institutions of the state, it did make sense to treat political entrepreneurs as strategically-driven and goal-oriented actors. These credibly appeared to be rational utility maximisers for their constituencies, given the situation and their shared preference for EU accession.^[50]

The institutionalist perspective put forward by Cowles et al. therefore was a hard sell from the start.^[51] The emphasis on the impact domestic institutions have on political actors’ preference formation had invited rethinking of Europeanization as a process of social learning about the appropriate and ‘proper, i.e. a socially accepted behaviour in a given situation’.^[52] But placing the focus of analysis on European norms, values and identities as structural constraints, system changing factors were as difficult to pin down then as they are now. No wonder, therefore, that the project of seeing Europeanization as a process of comprehensive social and political learning in the context of changing political institutions would have required studying social as well as political processes. Rather than perusing a narrow-gauge analysis of policy change, this type of Europeanization research would have placed the emphasis on the emergence of new norms, ideas and collective understandings in the established institutional context, followed by norm internalisation and the development of new identities via socialisation and social learning.^[53]

Scoping sets of responses by political entrepreneurs to expectations of external (i.e. European) actors appeared, therefore, a much more straightforward, though laborious task. This rational choice perspective on Europeanization via sets of policy changes has offered a parsimonious account of changes in the horizon of opportunity with few immediate constraints on actors’ choices. Börzel and Risse,^[54] for example, emphasised opportunities over constraints, in the process of reallocation of resources, leading to the differential empowerment of actors at the domestic level. Only later has Börzel^[55] inserted a critical correction as to the role of factors influencing the desired outcomes, including multiple veto points and mediating formal (i.e. political) institutions that would constrain adaptation processes to the externally set expectations as perceived by domestic actors.

It is in this context that the buzzword ‘goodness of fit’ came in as a necessary condition for thinking about domestic change as a result of (and exposure to) Europeanization.^[56] Most of the research dealing with Europeanization has been facing this common threat with caution: although a degree of ‘misfit’ is necessary for Europeanization to be effective domestically, the measurement and assessment of difference between European and domestic policies, processes, and expectations have been hard to benchmark. Regardless of this, the ‘goodness of fit’ between the European and domestic levels determined the set of factors which could be studied to ascertain change.^[57] However, the failure to identify who and what is to change in the process, as well as the lack of engagement with the notion of political change in this earlier literature on Europeanization has hampered its own progress. The emphasis on rational choice in momentous processes resulted in the over-reliance of Europeanization research on the analysis of political entrepreneurs’ choices that matched the goals they shared with their electorates (EU membership at all costs). It has removed political institutions—and as such, sociological institutionalism—from systematic accounts of domestic change that have been labelled ‘top-down Europeanization’, merely focussing on the impact of (variously defined) European actors on weak and largely unconsolidated candidate and neighbouring countries.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the development of the Europeanization scholarship has been marred by comparisons of the tentative outcomes of EU-driven, top-down processes that are only notionally useful to analytically benchmark processes not yet complete. We believe, therefore, that the weakness of the Europeanization scholarship in relation to candidate and neighbourhood countries has been due to scholars’ reluctance to engage with the fundamental notion of political change in the region exposed to Europeanization (however one chooses to define it). Essentially conceived, European institutions are viewed as agents of political change in target countries of Europeanization, yet much of the scholarship cited above is complacent in viewing European institutions either as a homogenous actor, or as sets of overlapping European institutional initiatives that have a joint agenda by virtue of sharing an agency. In so doing, it appears, Europeanization research has been subverting coherent understandings about the EU’s own commitment to the norms and values it preaches. This is largely due to the fact, as we shall discuss below, that Europeanization research is in fact little more than research on Europeanization discourse, not on the change in the name of Europe.

Europeanization Research after the Europeanization Process

There is a clear sense of optimism in much of the debate in the Europeanization scholarship that the changing focus from a set of member states to sets of candidate countries and later to neighbourhood countries will allow continuous discussion of the EU’s impact on target countries of research. Yet as EU conditionality has become a much weaker driver of domestic change in the Western Balkans and Turkey over the past decade, how much room is there left for optimism?

Although the EU has retained its superior bargaining power by which it could entice and rationalise domestic change in exchange for credible benefits, there is also a shared view of enlargement fatigue. The EU’s willingness to accept new member states is, according to explanations found in the literature, limited in part by its own credibility to impose sanctions on countries insufficiently prepared for membership, or by the EU itself delaying the progress on the acquis.^[58] Increasingly, scholarly voices have emerged suggesting that the EU’s capacity to deliver the ‘ultimate reward of membership’ at low cost to the current candidate countries is disappearing rapidly.^[59] This is further compounded by the extension of membership criteria beyond the narrow scope of those outlined in the Copenhagen criteria and more stringent monitoring for the current candidate countries on these past and new requirements. In the accession process of the Western Balkan countries and Turkey, the EU has stressed the absorption capacity of domestic polities and the acquiescence of the European public.^[60] Tocci emphasises that in the case of Turkey, country-specific issues have mutated into ‘informal conditions’ for membership; the size and growth of a country’s population are in no way related to the Copenhagen criteria and/or the new criteria regarding the implementation of the rule of law.^[61] Similarly, issues related to peace-building, regional cooperation, and security sector reforms have increasingly been prioritised; meanwhile, the security dimension has been added as a criterion specific to the Western Balkans.^[62]

Therefore, unlike the accession process of post-communist Eastern European states, the cases of the Western Balkans and Turkey allow us to refocus on the essentials of the EU accession process. Yet again, whereas past work on Europeanization has underlined the rational choice of domestic political entrepreneurs, we believe that domestic institutional designs should take centre stage in the analysis of Europeanization processes in the Western Balkans and Turkey.^[63] Factors such as governments’ ability to circumvent legally entrenched legal norms, the perils of state weakness, and ‘limited statehood’ are all a reflection of the recent scholarship on hampered domestic change in these countries.^[64]

We should take research on Turkey as an indicative case for demonstrating the deficits of Europeanization research at large, and miscalculations of the rational choice perspectives about the (anticipated) effects of EU conditionality more specifically. Since the importance of EU accession has been diminishing for Turkey, we should have seen not only the effects of conditionality dwindle, but also an increasing mismatch between European and Turkish domestic policy outputs, political throughputs and normative inputs. However, before July 2016’s failed coup, what some refer to as ‘Europeanization’ seemed to remain emotive, and as such inconsistent and selective.^[65] Thus the direction of change in Turkey’s domestic political landscape and the revisions to its political institutions conducted as a result of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s new mandate will provide empirical detail for scholars to test existing explanations of domestic change. There is certainly a wealth of studies with which to engage. On the one hand, much research draws attention to domestic elites as actors—rather than mediators—of Europeanization^[66] being ineptly involved in the formation of government preferences,^[67] social movements,^[68] incentives for and strategies of the political elites,^[69] the strategic use of appeals to the EU^[70] and policy entrepreneurship.^[71] On the other hand, the adverse consequences of the Europeanization process in relation to freedom of expression,^[72] the rule of law,^[73] and for politically mobilised civil society^[74] should highlight the effective role of European involvement in mediating, if not steering domestic institutional developments.

The Western Balkans constitutes another ‘borderline case’ of Europeanization since the targeted states in the region do not have the necessary capacity for the EU’s transformative power to effectively drive reforms.^[75] Domestic conditions, such as state capacity, unsettled borders, strong clientelism of political elites, and entrenched elites have all been a part of the scholarship on Europeanization of the region.^[76] These studies have all been pointing to the role domestic institutions play in effective engagement with sets of European norms, regulations and policies. It is our contention that this should be taken more seriously in the future. Many political institutional structures in the Western Balkans have been extremely unfavourable for domestic political as well as social change, and as such have driven research on Europeanization of the region into the doldrums. This is unlikely to change, as the involvement of international institutions in state-building across the Western Balkans is likely to slide further down the European agenda. But as we have outlined above, it is the focus on the short-term rationality of actors on the ground who implement policies that has been at the centre of research on Europeanization. Far too little attention has been paid to political institutions already in place to facilitate those actors’ choices and successful implementation of policies delegated from the EU down. Most importantly, we believe that the cases of the Western Balkan states now indicate that Europeanization as a political project and also as a scholarly set of discursive projects by political entrepreneurs requires a revision to maintain momentum.

Over the past decade the focus of research has been on the limits of the EU’s transformative power to effectuate change in the region, connected to a concern of domestic actors in the process of enlargement conditionality. As we argue, however, more importance should be granted to the pivotal role domestic institutions play in the background of the process. The case of Turkey provides just one such insightful point for revision: Aydin-Düzgit discusses how Europeanization operates in the area of discourse on political change and spills over into both societies and political elites’ expectations of the efficacy of the state.^[77] Far from drumming up concerns about the ‘nasty consequences of Europeanization’, we can therefore conclude that much of the literature on the impact of Europeanization has dealt implicitly with discourses on the potential, as opposed to the actual impact which EU membership would offer domestic political entrepreneurs to exploit weaknesses of barely consolidated democratic institutions to their own advantage.

Little wonder, therefore, that the Europeanization literature still encounters areas for further research: patchy theorising on cause and effect in domestic change particularly requires more systematic empirical datasets, not only on countries (such as old member states), but also on entire regions (e.g. Southern Caucasus). In addition, a lack of agreement on the empirical remit of the concept itself opens up leeway for scholarship on ‘reverse Europeanization’ and a normative bias in assessment invites discussions on the so-called ‘adverse consequences’ of Europeanization. Overall, however, the repeated references to processes, whereas in fact outcomes are being studied further compromises the explanatory value of Europeanization debates and crucially the lifetime of descriptive scholarship produced.

Instead of Conclusion. Whither Europeanization Research?

Let us therefore finally unpack the meanings invested into Europeanization as a tool for analysis. Since Schmidt and Radaelli’s work, it has been clear that two perspectives on Europeanization exist: one focuses on it as a process, while the other treats Europeanization as sets of top-down outcomes by different, in part overlapping European organisations focussed on the nation-state.^[78] Indeed, the considerable bulk of the literature has used Europeanization as a short-hand term for the top-down impact of the EU on domestic politics, polity and policy. This has largely been due to the influential top-down, unidirectional view of the process as advocated by Radaelli, Schimmelfennig, and Sedelmeier.^[79] Yet, with the EU in multiple crises and the ability of the European centre to advise, pressure and oversee domestic change in tatters, there are limits to the helpfulness of any established analytical tool in a top-down understanding of Europeanization. In our paper we have considered these aforementioned problematic legacies of the scholarship on Europeanization and explored the potential available in the use of the concept for analysis of processes of social and political change across the wider European region. There are still many issues left to ‘talk the talk’ of Europeanization.

Our interim assessment of the scholarship on Europeanization, however, is pessimistic: we believe that in order to expand the theoretical toolbox on Europeanization, we ought to untangle past research findings on policy changes conducted from a normative standpoint from those engaging in analysis of a narrower scope, especially functional changes on the interface of the politics and societies affected. It is in this context that we attest that particularly the scholarship on Europeanization as a one-way road to Brussels, has reached a dead-end. At the same time, those referencing Europeanization as a horizon of opportunity for statecraft have been underexplored and offer much needed leeway for empirical studies.

The main claim of this paper has been that whereas the use of the concept in past research has been extremely effective in focussing on outcomes as opposed to processes, it has profited from a lack of epistemic clarity about how Europeanization works and capitalised on an ontological fuzziness of what Europeanization is. There remain, therefore, some considerable lessons to learn from the past scholarship. Despite our overall pessimism in our assessment on the work of Europeanization to date, we believe that more can be gained from an understanding of Europeanization as a peer-to-peer learning dynamic, as well as by disengaging from overtly normative accounts of Europeanization’s unidirectional impacts on member states, as well as candidate and neighbourhood countries.

Neither should the scholarship on Europeanization as a process be laid to rest. Regardless of widely held concerns about the fate of the EU itself, its enlargement and/or coherence of the European normative space conjured particularly as a result of the momentous Brexit vote in the UK, Europeanization as a tool of analysis bears some considerable value for explaining sets of political, social, economic and not least cultural processes across the wider European space. If only it was applied systematically, it would also gain unprecedented heuristic value to not only tap into processes of political and economic change, but also broader social transformations in the region covered by the accession Europeanization research.

So far, this spectrum in Europeanization research has provided scholars a range of issues to explore dynamics of Europeanization, but also increasingly de-Europeanization as part of a strategic use of unconsolidated institutions by utility maximising political entrepreneurs. In the end, such developments signify the need for further scholarly attention to the role played by political institutions in new and old, candidate and potential candidate countries as well as in neighbourhood countries all striving to consolidate their domestic political regimes in the light of perceived or real pressures from European institutions.