Outline of a Sociology of Europeanization

Europeanization is not linked to any particular theory but instead gives rise to an empirical research agenda with a broad field of application. Through empirical insights and studies, sociologists have contributed to both our generic understanding of Europeanization as the process of creating new social arenas for regular, intensified, and institutionalized interactions among actors (states, organizations, firms, and individuals) and to all its specific subfields of understanding process, institutional change, mechanisms, and impact/effects. Broadly speaking, sociologists would not only analyse exchanges within a regulatory state or multi-level governance system but also changes in state-society relationships. Europeanization is therefore useful as a term that shows the ways in which the EU relates back to pre-existing national societies and/or might even trigger a process of European society building. In this contribution, the broad range of theoretical toolkits will be outlined that is available within the disciplinary tradition of sociology for the development of a more nuanced understanding of this nexus between supranational European integration, domestic change and societal transformation in a combination of macro, meso and micro models of social analysis.