Suchergebnisse

As a strategy of self-representation and a device of power, Europeanization is fundamentally reorganizing territoriality and peoplehood, the two principles of group identification that have shaped modern European order. It is the result of a new level and intensity of integration that has been a reaction to the destruction of this century's first and second world wars and the collapse of the cold-war division of Europe into an East and West. Driven above all by the organizational and administrative power of the European Union (EU), Europeanization is still distinct from the EU. Neither Europeanization nor the EU will replace the nation-state, which, for now, remains a superior form for organizing democratic participation and territoriality. Nonetheless, they will likely force states to yield some questions of sovereignty—above all, military, political, and economic—to the EU or other transnational bodies. Nations are now being brought into new relations with each other, creating new alliances and enmities, and are even recreating themselves. The authors explore five domains of practice where the process of Europeanization might be fruitfully studied: language, money, tourism, sex, and sport. They suggest dealing with the EU as a continental political unit of a novel order and with Europeanization pragmatically as both a vision and a process.

Johan Olsen, a well known expert on higher education, asked the following question: "Is Europeanization as disappointing a term as it is fashionable? Should it be abandoned or is it useful for understanding European transformations? It is our assessment that the concept of Europeanization is rather useful, despite being occasionally vague. In fact, its vagueness contributes to the flexibility which the EU member states want to maintain, while they try to achieve common goals through coordination and a process free from regulation and supranational decision-making. The freedom, autonomy and diversity of European higher education have helped the development of one of the most successful and the best-performing systems of higher education worldwide. In only three years, there will be a European Higher Education Area. Present day achievements in higher education are the building blocks of tomorrow's common EHEA. Europeanization is paving the way, we should maintain it and continue with it.

This dissertation begins from the hypothesis that the direction and extent of Europeanization depends on domestic perception of the European Union and its norms. Accordingly, it was my empirical ambition to study how competing articulations of the EU and its norms constructed debates in EU member and candidate countries. I have pled for greater meta-theoretical awareness in Europeanization scholarship, accompanied by a shift in the ontological reading of underlying questions about the meaning and content of Europeanization. The result of the established theoretical and empirical considerations was a novel framework for the study of Europeanization embedded in poststructuralism. Poststructuralism rests on a dual ontological foundation. The first premise maintains reality's discursivity. This suggests that social identities, albeit materially grounded, do not exist outside of language. The second premise rejects the existence of structural totality in view of mutual constitutivness of structure and agency in political articulations. Poststructuralism points the analysis towards the question of how actors' practices articulate the discourses that constitute social reality. It is therefore fit to theorize Europeanization by linking the underlying discourses on Europe, the perception of EU rules and norms in the domestic debate, and the final policy effects. The empirical ambition of the thesis was to adopt the poststructuralist approach to Europeanization by examining how competing articulations of the EU and its norms constructed state territoriality in debates of countries/candidates for EU membership. More specifically, the study offered a critical reading of Europeanization in examining the (re)construction of domestic understanding of territoriality vis-à-vis the EU in Czech and Slovak pre-accession debates on territorial reforms. The aim was to define underlying meta-discursive representations of Europe in relation to the state that in turn informed Europeanization. These meta-discourses were then adopted and modified in the study of the reterritorialization discourse in pre-accession Croatia.