Europeanization in History: An Introduction

Abstract

Europeanization has turned into a ‘growth industry’. Now a catchword in political as well as academic realms, the term has enjoyed rapidly increasing usage, driven principally by the growing importance of the European Union. Its predominant connotation stems from the process of Europe’s contemporary political integration: since the early 1990s, Europeanization has been most often associated with new forms of European governance and the adaptation of nation-state legal and administrative procedures to the pressures associated with EU membership. Consequently, the term has been used primarily in the fields of law and political science.¹ In recent years, however, a few anthropologists have weighed into the debate and begun to analyse the reconstruction of collective and personal identities brought about by processes of European integration.² In these ways, Europeanization has become one of the central concepts by which social scientists conceptualize the accelerating processes of change that have transformed Europe’s recent past and present, and that will define its near future. However, all of these variations of literature share the same point of reference: the organizational structure and spatial dimension of the European Union. For historians concerned specifically with the EU’s history, this approach might be fruitful - even if few such historians of European integration have so far chosen to enter into this cross-disciplinary debate.³ At the same time, this whole strand of research restricts and scales down ‘Europeanization’ to a process closely linked to recent political and institutional developments.

Apart from the other contributors to this volume, we would like to thank Johan Schot and Cornelius Torp for their helpful remarks on earlier versions of this text. Martin Conway deserves special thanks. Only the two of us know how much we owe to his comments and suggestions on matters large and small.