This paper builds on new governance theories to demonstrate that Europeanisation is a phenomenon that transcends EU territorial boundaries and affects the foreign policy of non-EU member states. More specifically, the paper enquires into the politics of declaratory alignment of seventeen European non-EU member states in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It analyses quantitatively the frequency with which those non-EU states have aligned themselves with EU declarations over the past ten years, and it researches qualitatively the causal and constitutive underpinnings of declaratory alignment. The paper notes that non-EU states’ positions in the OSCE are often distinctively convergent with EU preferences, notwithstanding their highly differentiated relations with the EU. It nevertheless identifies differential patterns of declaratory alignment, which it traces back, inductively, to the structural and individual level, based on relevant interviews. The paper thence scrutinises the legal-institutional conditions that are enshrined in the various conditionality regimes developed by the EU in its European periphery; the teleological motives that prompt non-EU states to emulate EU practices or seek utilitarian solutions; and the dispositional forces that induce them to behave in an appropriate manner, having internalised alignment as a norm. It concludes that in foreign policy matters, compliance plays a non-essential role in re-orientating the multilateral diplomacy of EU partners; that other mechanisms, such as emulative learning, lesson-drawing, persuasion and socialisation play a deeper role; and that EU external governance goes beyond enlargement politics.
