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This article examines the extent to which European Council summits contribute to the Europeanisation of national public spheres, focusing on the use of X (formerly known as Twitter). The empirical analysis provided here entails quantitative elements on four European Council summits held in 2023: to what extent did X users located in different EU member states post about the European Council summits? On which issues did X users focus during the summits? To what extent did this activity generate transnational interactions? Through which language did X users mostly communicate? The findings seek to feed both the public discussion and academic dialogue about the impact of social media on the establishment of an online European public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking religious education as an important indicator in evaluating religious freedom in a country, this paper focuses on the religion courses in Turkey in order to evaluate Europeanisation and religious freedom in the country. The EU Commission's recent progress reports indicated that the conduct of religious courses in Turkey is incompatible with EU norms. Although important legal arrangements have been made in accordance with the adoption of minority rights in Turkey, it seems more difficult for change to happen in an ideological issue such as education. As religious freedom is an important value for the European Union, this paper aims to explore the impact of Europeanisation on the state of religious education in Turkey and the extent of Turkey's compliance with the European norms in a highly debated area like religious education. It also aims, in a broader sense, to shed a light on the place of religion in the national identity of Turkey today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether the lead candidates process for the European Commission's Presidency (Spitzenkandidat) increases the Europeanisation of national public spheres to a certain extent. National public spheres are likely to be Europeanised when simultaneous discussions of the same topics take place across member states and under the same criteria of relevance. Focusing on the media-related public sphere, the research employs quantitative content analysis and qualitative frame analysis in the German, Luxembourgish, French, Belgian, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and British press for the 2014 and 2019 European elections. While in 2014, the salience of the Spitzenkandidat process was relevantly high, despite certain country- and media-specific variations, in 2019, the press coverage dropped off by almost half. At the same time, most of the selected newspapers reported on the issue using the same criteria of relevance, namely, similar frames and meaning structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research has established the political impact of Europeanisation on candidate countries, the impact of discursive Europeanisation on cultural issues such as LGBT norms remains understudied. This article pursues this agenda by exploring the impact of Europeanisation on Turkey's domestic discourse on LGBT issues – specifically, whether Europeanisation has influenced the media discourse of LGBT issues in Turkey. Turkey presents an interesting case as its largely conservative society is in contrast with the EU in which LGBT acceptance has gained unprecedented traction. A media content analysis comparing Turkish media reports from the year of 2005 and 2010 is used to test this thesis. The study discovers that prospective European integration has influenced the LGBT discourses of Turkey over the study period; while the majority of reports on LGBT issues continues to be negatively represented, results show an improvement over the study period. The changes effectuated were statistically significant and suggest that LGBT and possibly other cultural norms may not be as resistant to discursive Europeanisation. This study also highlights how regional integration continues to be an effective avenue for inducing normatively positive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing academic interest in the development policy of the European Union (EU) and the booming literature on Europeanisation, the impact of Europe on national development policies has largely been overlooked. By exploring member state interactions with and through the EU level across a number of different issues, this study looks to herald a new research agenda. The picture emerging from the empirical evidence is that of modest degrees of Europeanisation. In fact, resistance to Europe can be attributed to different (f)actors, some operating at the domestic level (e.g. established cultural and normative structures, different types of veto players) and others related to the existence of several groupings with alternative policy prescriptions (e.g. Nordic donors, like-minded countries, former colonial powers). Even where there are signs of convergence (or divergence), they may be due to other influences rather than pressures coming from the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Conclusion revisits the key ideas put forward in the Introduction, examines the evidence presented in the articles as a whole, and identifies some avenues for further exploration. It focuses on four areas: first, the extent of agency evident in EU development policies at the level of the EU itself; second, the mediating factors that can modify, reinforce or undermine EU policies at the national or the global level; third, the variable impact of the EU framework on policy, polity and politics at the national level; fourth, the extent and depth of the transformation brought about by EU development policies. It is suggested that processes of globalisation and (re)nationalisation are at least as important as EU development policies in shaping the pattern of development assistance in the EU, and that linkages between the three levels are likely to form a fertile basis for future research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the extent bilateral adoption of Aid for Trade (AfT) norms in Europe is the result of a Europeanisation process. Using three case study countries (Germany, Ireland, Czech Republic) we examine the level of Europeanisation across policies, polities and politics. We highlight the roles played by socialisation and capacity within this field, which forms an important test case for the Europeanisation of development policies as it blurs the distinction between the European Union (EU)-member state shared competences of development with the EU single competence of trade. We find significant variation in both the depth and speed in adapting the EU AfT norms. Our investigation into the AfT Europeanisation process in Germany, Ireland and the Czech Republic found this variation to be a function of both capacity and socialisation with the caveat that capacity appears as a more influential explanatory factor in the depth of Europeanisation while socialisation may promote a speedier process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2002 the European Union (EU) decided to gradually increase its official development assistance (ODA) towards the ‘0.7% norm’ by 2015. Both in terms of policy and in terms of procedures, this constituted a remarkable integrationist shift in EU development policy. However, it is unclear to what extent this integrationist shift (bottom-up) has effectively enhanced the EU's influence over its member states (top-down). More than 13 years after the EU's explicit goal to Europeanise the ODA issue, this article aims to assess to what extent it has been successful. More specifically, it analyses the impact of the EU's ‘0.7% norm’ on the national aid budgets. Through an inductive analysis involving 15 member states over a large time span, a comprehensive assessment of Europeanisation is provided. The conclusion reads that nothing is like it seems: ostensible compliance with EU targets appears mostly unrelated to the EU, while the EU might have contributed to non-compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last decade, budget support (BS) has become one of the most popular and controversial aid modalities. The tensions between the EU and member states regarding the use of this modality set in motion interesting policy influencing dynamics. We reconstruct these processes looking at two turning-points (the inception and the subsequent reform of the BS policy) and compare over time the positions, capacities and policies of three EU member states with varying positions towards BS: Germany, the UK and Belgium. We find no evidence that the EU has been able to download its BS policies. Instead we find some evidence of limited delegation to the EU level, and strong indications of member states uploading policy preferences to the EU level. We further argue that domestic politics in member states matters more than EU aid policy prescriptions, and that the EU's policy space is crucially influenced by its own and member states capacities and autonomy to build political alliances around policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a plausibility probe for the significance of international constructivist ‘mediating factors’ to explain variation in Europeanisation outcomes. It applies a most similar systems design (or Mill's method of difference) to show that the UK has internalised political conditionality to a larger extent than France at least partially because it has been the object of stronger socialisation pressures within the ‘Nordic Plus’ group. The article contributes to the literature on Europeanisation and development cooperation in two important ways. First, it enlarges its scope of analysis, both geographically (beyond new European Union member states) and thematically (beyond simple measures of aid quality and/or quantity). Second, it emphasises the importance of international (versus domestic) mediating factors. The empirical analysis focusses on three cases of aid sanctions in response to human rights abuses and democratic setbacks: Zimbabwe 2002, Madagascar 2009 and Mozambique 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In spite of Italy's extraordinary ratio of foreign aid channelled through the European Union and its support for a common European approach to international development promoted by the European Commission, combined with significant Europeanisation pressures since the early 2000s, the ‘impact of Europe’ on Italy's development policy has been rather limited. Examining the issues of quantity and quality of aid between 2002 and 2014, and the process that led to the adoption of a new development law in 2014, this paper seeks to explain why Europe matters so little in the evolution of Italy's development policy. The central argument is that Italy's propensity to Europeanise its development policy depends on two key factors: domestic politics, in particular the different agendas of governing party coalitions; and the multilateralisation of aid, specifically the set of perverse effects it generates on the bilateral component of development policy, irrespective of changing governing coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Nordic countries have traditionally been praised for their generous and advanced development policies. Recently, however, it has been claimed that the Nordic model has faded: that the Nordic donors have become more similar to other European donors. One possible reason for such trends is influences from EU policies, that is, Europeanisation. This article critically evaluates such claims by presenting arguments for and against Europeanisation effects. We argue that changes have indeed taken place. The Nordic exceptionalism has been eroded. At the same time, a convergence of European aid policies has occurred. The question is if this is the consequence of Europeanisation – or is it rather a result of Nordicisation (the Nordic countries influencing the EU), or perhaps like-mindisation (a broader set of progressive member states having impact upon EU policies)? We suggest that Europeanisation has been extremely weak while there is strong evidence of Nordicisation but also, and increasingly, of like-mindisation. Today, a core group of mainly northern member states, including the Nordics, are the main driving forces behind European aid convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The challenge of isolating the impact of Europeanisation is an arduous one, which explains why analysts have preferred complex rather than parsimonious explanations of this phenomenon. Given this predilection among scholars, it is surprising that the concept of regime complexity has not been meaningfully applied in the Europeanisation literature. This article lays some initial groundwork for assessing whether regime complexity has weakened or reinforced the impact of Europeanisation, with reference specifically to French aid. This article begins by highlighting the limited impact of Europeanisation on French assistance in the early decades of European integration. Next, it demonstrates how the climate became more propitious as from the late 1990s following domestic reforms, increased European Union (EU) pressures and the emergence of an aid regime complex. Drawing on elite interviews, it shows how France has become more receptive to Europeanisation, while also using regime complexity to reframe EU norms. Finally, it explains why and how France has resisted Europeanisation and explores the wider significance of the French case and of regime complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The key objective of this Conclusion is to highlight the broader conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions of this edited volume. Reflecting on the paired articles, the conclusion explores the implications of the collection on the interplay between the modes of governance that constitute citizenship regimes and their effects on ‘lived citizenship’ that characterise individuals' experiences of this governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses clientelism as a complex structure impacting on social welfare in the context of transition, war, new nation-state building and authoritarian populist political settlements. The paper explores the development of clientelistic welfare in Croatia through an examination of captured and categorical distributional effects, the dominance of nationality over territorial-based citizenship claims, and the politicisation of the nature and scale of governance. The privileging of the rights of war veterans and of those of Croatian ethnicity particularly from neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina constitute dominant clientelistic practices largely resistant to change. The capacity of the European Union (EU) accession process to counter clientelistic aspects of welfare has proved to be extremely limited. Although the accession process impacted on and reconfigured economic, political and social arrangements, this was not a radical ‘break’ with the social and political circumstances, particularly in the 1990s, which had produced and consolidated these clientelistic welfare arrangements. Indeed, after the gaining of EU membership on 1 July 2013, with the translation of EU-led austerity politics, ideas of social citizenship may be unravelling once more in Croatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyses the effect of Europeanisation on sovereignty in the post-Yugoslav states by examining the evolution of the different states’ policies related to extradition of their own nationals. Extradition is an important aspect of these countries’ political transformation, because the rule of law and regional co-operation are enshrined in the set of conditions these countries have to meet to enter the European Union. The research thus looks at how the different post-Yugoslav states approach the extradition of their own nationals, and whether they have altered them in view of the requirements of the accession process. By doing so, this paper looks at the dynamics between the duty of the state to protect its citizens and the transformative power of Europeanisation in the Western Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Introduction explains the origins of the project of exploring citizenship and citizenship-related issues in the framework of Europeanisation in the new states in South East Europe. It defines the terminology used in the contributions and explains the conceptual underpinnings of the project and the structure of the edited collection. Finally, these introductory remarks also give an overview of the contributions to the special issue of Perspectives on European Politics and Societies entitled, ‘The governance of citizenship practices in the post-Yugoslav states: The impact of Europeanisation.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]