Some scholars believe that support for external regional integration is an expression of the EU’s ‘propensity to reproduce itself’. It is argued that through providing other regional initiatives with political, financial and administrative support the EU aims to export its integration experience. This claim, however, remains largely unsubstantiated. It is often almost taken for granted that the EU’s support for external regionalism entails the export of the EU model. Defining the EU model through its external action, as well as equalling it with regional integration per se is, however, fraught with the danger of inflating the impact of the EU on the development of other regional fora. The proposed paper contests the notion of a single EU model. The different facets of EU regionalism are conceptualized as sets of templates that only loosely fit together. The distinction is made between three sets of templates: institutional, normative, and substantive. It is argued that specific properties of EU integration are borrowed selectively rather than in the entirety of the ‘EU model’. This approach relaxes the sometimes-implied expectation that the EU’s promotion of regional integration should produce EU replicas in other parts of the world. Exploring patterns in the EU’s promotion of its templates to external regional groupings, the paper seeks to contribute to the current scholarship on comparative regionalism and the EU’s impact on external regional integration.
