'New Perspectives in European Studies: Europeanisation in the EU and the Neighbourhood'

UACES CRN Centrifugal Europe - Annual Research Symposium 2015 Queen's University Belfast, 6-7 March 2015

The European Union (EU) is facing increasing difficulties relating to the processes of political, economic and societal integration. Despite the change promoted during accession negotiations, EU candidate and neighbourhood countries have challenged the linear understanding of Europeanisation in a variety of areas across the continent. In recent years, research on Europeanisation has emphasised diffusion mechanisms and differentiated integration to explain variation in outcome rather than the lack of precision in and the direction of travel of European norms. Indeed, candidate and neighbourhood countries have remarkable leeway in deciding which aspects of European norms to adopt, and how to implement them. This raises questions about the role of the EU in policy convergence in candidate countries and the ENP and about the norms the EU endorses in practice. Yet, the Europeanisation phenomenon has effectively travelled to the neighbourhood of the EU and in the absence of membership prospects for the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) countries, such a development is puzzling.

The ongoing European crisis has created new challenges and brought tensions (old and new) to the surface at both state and sub-state level, leading to debates about the relationship between the national and the supra-national, and the limits of sovereignty within the EU in its current form. Such developments represent an unprecedented reversal of the centripetal forces that characterised European integration in the decades prior to the current crisis, and ask serious questions about the future of the EU and its integration project. Against the background, our conference explores the Europeanization in the EU proper, enlargement and ENP countries (incl. Turkey, Western Balkans and previous accession countries). We welcome contributions which ask whether the integration of European norms in the wider European context is going ahead despite crisis or has it been put on back burner?

The conference will feature eight research panels on theoretical approaches to Europeanisation, political change and post-conflict transformation in the EU, the European Neighbourhood and the Western Balkans; a roundtable discussion with representatives from the European Commission, and a book panel discussing the importance of Good neighbourly relations in Europe (Kochenov & Basheska, eds, Good Neighbourly Relations in the European Legal Context, Brill Nijhoff, 2015).

The conference will also feature three keynote addresses (more information about the speakers below):

• Prof Florian Bieber, (De-)Democratisation Processes in Western Balkans in the Context of EU Integration
• Dr Stéphanie Laulhé Shaelou, Europeanisation as Legal Integration? Ten years after the big bang enlargement
• Dr Melanie Ram, Europeanized Hypocrisy: Roma Inclusion and Exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe

 

 

https://sites.google.com/site/centrifugalism/departments/events/belfast2015