Europeanisation and EU’s Statebuilding

The course revisits different meanings of Europeanisation as an analytical concept, evaluates its usefulness for theory-informed empirical research and discusses one of those conceptualisations in connection with the notion of statebuilding. The latter serves as a background for exploring the EU’s efforts to influence the development of its neighbourhood.

The course consists of four parts. It begins by introducing different theoretical frameworks and contentious issues in the contemporary research on statebuilding, as well as current practices of international statebuilding (1). It discusses the shifts in the debate on the subject and the key concepts that have developed within it. It then examines theoretical underpinnings of Europeanisation as a particular instance of statebuilding and an analytical framework that has accommodated various phenomena and has been both widely applied and extensively criticised (2). Within the realm of statebuilding, the course examines some political spaces within the EU where Europeanisation can be discerned (3), i.e. the EU’s foreign policy making, including the emergence of its administrative governance (Brusselisation), (non-) Europeanisation of member states foreign policy making, and the projection of EU notions of good governance onto its neighbourhood (4). The latter includes an extended discussion of EU’s statebuilding practices in the Western Balkans and the Eastern Neighbourhood with an emphasis on the role of borders and the construction of the integrated border management.