From Europeanisation to Diffusion: Introduction

Abstract

This special issue explores to what extent policies and institutions of the European Union spread across different contexts. Are the EU's attempts to transfer its policies and institutions to accession and neighbourhood countries sustainable and effective? To what degree do other regions of the world emulate the EU's institutional features; what are the mechanisms of, and scope conditions for, their diffusion? This introduction provides the conceptual framework of the special issue. First, it specifies EU-related institutional change as the ‘dependent variable’. Second, it discusses how Europeanisation research and diffusion studies relate to each other and can be fruitfully combined to identify processes and mechanisms by which ideas and institutions of the EU spread. Third, we introduce scope conditions which are likely to affect domestic (or regional) change in response to the promotion or emulation of EU ideas and institutions.

Acknowledgements

This special issue resulted from the project ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’ at the Research College (Kolleg-Forschergruppe, KFG) at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) whose generous support is gratefully acknowledged. The various drafts of the papers were presented at the KFG's first international conference, 10–11 December 2009, and at a workshop on 22–23 October 2010 at the KFG. We thank all participants and discussants for their input and critical comments. In particular, we are grateful to Tina Freyburg, Liesbet Hooghe, Anja Jetschke, Diana Panke and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on this introduction.

Notes

1. Our distinction between direct and indirect influence differs from concepts such as leverage versus linkage (Levitsky and Way 2005) or external governance (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2010) since these still take the EU as the sender of policies and institutions employing soft or hard mechanisms.