Changing Conditions of Europeanisation: Geopolitics, Political Agency and EU Governance

Abstract

Europeanisation beyond the European Union has traditionally been understood as a process through which EU rules, norms and practices are progressively adopted by candidate and neighbouring states. Yet the conditions under which Europeanisation takes place are changing. Intensifying geopolitical competition, evolving forms of political agency, changing conceptions of EU power, and increasingly complex modes of EU governance challenge linear accounts of Europeanisation based primarily on conditionality, rule transfer and membership incentives. This panel examines how these changing conditions reshape the possibilities, modalities and outcomes of Europeanisation beyond EU borders. The four papers approach this question from complementary perspectives. Two papers focus on Serbia and examine complementary dimensions of the changing conditions of Europeanisation. The first investigates how geopolitical competition between the EU, Russia and China alters the operation of EU conditionality, showing how Serbian elites can strategically hedge between competing external patrons while EU actors may exercise forbearance in response to geopolitical risks. The third examines the EU’s role conception in response to Serbian protest movements. It demonstrates how the interaction between normative and geopolitical roles can reshape EU engagement with democratic contestation, suggesting that geopoliticisation may at times disrupt rather than simply reinforce the EU’s stabilitocratic tendencies. A third paper shifts the focus to EU–Georgia relations and critically examines the EU’s turn towards strategic autonomy through a relational understanding of power. It argues that hierarchical conceptions of capacity and security can reproduce asymmetrical relations with the eastern neighbourhood and limit reciprocal and co-constitutive dimensions of Europeanisation. A fourth paper takes a comparative, sectoral perspective, examining the diffusion of strategic public procurement norms across the Western Balkans and Eastern Trio and asking whether the EU’s emerging strategic approach to the Single Market is being effectively extended to future and potential members or instead producing differentiated forms of regulatory integration. Taken together, the papers move beyond a linear understanding of Europeanisation as EU-to-candidate-state rule transfer. They show how Europeanisation is shaped by the interaction of geopolitical competition, political agency, changing conceptions of EU power, and evolving forms of EU governance across different policy domains. The panel therefore contributes to debates on the challenges of Europeanisation beyond EU borders by highlighting its contested, relational and differentiated character, while also examining how transformations within the EU affect the processes of Europeanisation it seeks to promote in candidate and neighbouring states.

Title	Details
Triangulated Capture: EU Conditionality, Geopolitical Competition, and the Logic of State Capture in Serbia	View Paper Details
Beyond Strategic Autonomy: Relational Power, Cultural Politics, and Europe’s Eastern Entanglements	View Paper Details
Between Norms and Geopolitics: The EU's Role Conception in Responses to Protest Movements in Serbia	View Paper Details