European Research Reloaded : Cooperation and Integration among Europeanized States

The Three Waves of European Research European cooperation and integration has continued to progress forward over the past five decades, with an ever deepening impact on the member states. The first wave of research into these processes concerned European integration, the process of institution building and policy developments at the European Union (EU) level. The second wave, on Europeanization used integration as an explanatory factor in understanding domestic political change and continuity related to the EU. What is now necessary is to link our understanding of these ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes of integration and Europeanization in the EU. This book argues that a third wave of research on the EU is needed to adequately understand the increased interconnectedness between the European and national political levels. We posit that this third wave should be sensitive to the temporal dimension of European integration and Europeanization. In particular, we seek to link the processes of European integration and Europeanization in a new way by asking the question: how has Europeanization affected current modes of integration and cooperation in the EU? Part I. Europeanization of the Member States. Preparing the ground for the third wave, the first part of the book concerns Europeanization. In order to fully understand the feedback of Europeanization on cooperation and integration it is important to analyze how European integration has had an impact on member states in the first place, in particular indirectly, beyond the direct mechanism of compliance with European policies.

European integration has had an ever deepening impact on the member states. The first wave of research concerned the process of institution building and policy developments at the European Union (EU) level. The second wave, on Europeanization used the resulting integration as an explanatory factor in understanding domestic political change and continuity. What is now necessary is to link our understanding of these ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes of integration and Europeanization.

This book argues that a third wave of research on the EU is needed to adequately understand the increased interconnectedness between the European and national political levels. We posit that this third wave should be sensitive to the temporal dimension of European integration and Europeanization. In particular, we ask: how has Europeanization affected current modes of integration and cooperation in the EU?

One of the key findings of the book is the astonishing variation in modes of cooperation in the EU. We suggest that this variation can be explained by taking into account the sources of legitimacy on which cooperation and integration are based. We argue that whereas economic integration could be sufficiently backed by output legitimacy, deeper integration in other areas requires a degree of input legitimacy that is currently lacking in the EU. Therefore, non-economic integration is often taking forms of looser types of cooperation, such as the open method of coordination and benchmarking. We elaborate on this speculation in the conclusion and believe that it should be part of the future research agenda.