Introduction: the Europeanisation of Southern Europe

Abstract

The present special issue on the Europeanisation of Southern Europe is more than a collection of up-to-date research papers on the different aspects of Europeanization. Its underlying rationale is to assess the problems, experiences and responses of, on the one hand, existing member states and, on the other hand, of new and candidate member states to Europeanisation. Different contributors in this issue use different definition(s) of Europeanisation (processes), and I am not going to offer in these opening lines yet another one: suffice to say that we all ascribe to the description of Europeanisation as ‘domestic change caused by European integration’. Another common thread of this issue’s papers is that they all address at least one of the three different mechanisms of Europeanisation’s impact on domestic change, identified by Knill and Lehmkuhl (2002): namely, (a) ‘institutional compliance’—where European policy making prescribes specific institutional requirements which have to be implemented, (b) ‘changing the domestic opportunity structures’—where the EU changes the ‘domestic rules of the game’, and finally (c) ‘a change in the beliefs and preferences of domestic actors’—a ‘framing integration’, affecting perceptions. The papers in this issue are organised in a way which allows the reader to progressively move across countries, national levels, policy domains and EU member state ‘categories’ in a differentiated pace: though each contribution is self-contained, one can easily draw comparisons with its preceding and following ones. In the first paper, Massimiliano Andretta and Manuela Caiani discuss the Europeanisation of the Italian social movements, employing a dual approach: on the one hand, with a top-down approach, they assess whether and how social movements are adapting their strategies within a Europeanised context, and whether and how they are able to seize the new European opportunities for achieving their goals, reaching the conclusion that while social movements still seem better able to exploit the domestic political opportunities, nevertheless they are slowly adapting to the transforming political context, taking more and more into account the European level. On the other hand, using a bottom-up approach, they deal with whether and how social movements frame their claims and identities as ‘European’ and which kind of vision of the process of European integration they promote, concluding that while they are more