Europeanisation Via Practice – A Poststructuralist Account

This paper calls for reevaluating the relationship between discourse and institutions and essentially between Europe as a political project and the EU as the institutionalization of this project. By untangling the meaning of Europe from the EU’s institutional structure, it asks how European norms and rules become meaningful in domestic contexts. The article adopts a post-structuralist understanding of social structures as discursive and inherently contingent upon the context in which they are articulated. A post-structuralist understanding of social structures as discursive and contested challenges the neoinstitutionalist understanding of norms as finite (uncontested) and norm transfer as reproduction of one structure to novel spaces via thin/thick learning. Essentially, norm contestation as opposed to norm reproduction becomes the ordering principle of norm transfer. The paper attempts to establish a research framework for the study of Europeanization via norm contestation by drawing on data on the post-1990 Europeanization of the Western Balkans.