When European Union law hits the ground in the neighbourhood: bridging legal geography with Europeanization studies

This paper sets out a research agenda to analyse how European Union law is implemented in non-EU Member States in the EU's vicinity. While the impact of Europe in the EU's Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods has been extensively studied through the prism of the Europeanization theoretical framework, its attention has been largely directed to the transposition of EU law in domestic legislation and has neglected how EU law is implemented on the ground. This theoretical and empirical gap comes with no surprise, due to the lack of data on implementation in non-EU Member dates and the methodological challenges in measuring such variable. This article argues that legal geography has the potential to fill such gap. Legal geography looks at how law is experienced by citizens, and how spaces, time and law are co-constituted and transformed in the implementation phase of legislation. EU law is an interesting case for legal geography, since on the one hand, the 'uniform application throughout the Member States' is one of its core constitutional tenets, while, on the other hand, domestic implementing actors and courts have the ability to mediate the demands of EU law to account for local peculiarities and contexts. As a result, bridging legal geography and Europeanization could allow us to flip our analytical lens and depart from how domestic actors acted and re-acted during the implementation phase of EU law in the EU's vicinity. Three different directions of this new research agenda will be proposed: 1) the policymaking of EU law implementation, 2) the legal technicalities behind EU law implementation and 3) the governance of EU law implementation.