Euro Area entry in east-central Europe: Paradoxical Europeanisation and clustered convergence

Abstract

Economic and Monetary Union offers a useful case study for critically examining Europeanisation and conditionality as explanatory variables for the euro entry strategies of east-central European states. This article highlights the paradoxes of extreme and limited Europeanisation and of extreme ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ conditionality with multiple sources of uncertainty. These paradoxes have provided the context within which east-central European governments have evolved political strategies for the temporal management of euro entry. These strategies reflect in turn different ‘clusters’ of convergence in the Baltic States, the Visegrad states, and Slovenia. Euro Area accession in east-central Europe offers insights not just into how Europeanisation works in a central political issue area but also into the temporal management of EU policy and ‘clustered’ convergence.

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the workshop on Europeanisation in east-central Europe organised in February 2006 by Attila Agh and Klaus Goetz in Budapest under the auspices of the FP6 network of excellence EU-CONSENT. I am grateful to participants for their many helpful comments, as well as to constructive comments from two reviewers. The article develops the author's contribution to Enlarging the Euro Area (OUP 2006) by examining ‘clustered’ convergence and the role of temporal management in Europeanisation and by offering a more nuanced analysis of Europeanisation.