Territory, temporality and clustered Europeanization

Non-convergence amongst the EU member states, despite a wide range of integration effects, has come to be accepted as conventional wisdom in the Europeanization debate.This paper takes issue with the stress on non-convergence and makes a case for ‘clustered
Europeanization’. Clustering is promoted by two variables that have so far received little attention in Europeanization research: territory and temporality. Territory influences Europeanization through (a) ‘families of nations’ and (b) center-periphery structures in an expanding European political space. Temporality matters, in particular, through the ‘relative time of accession’, i.e. when countries joined (c) in relation to their domestic political and economic development and (d) in relation to the phase of European integration. While (a) and (c) promote intra-regional commonalities in Europeanization-related domestic variables, (b) and (d) highlight inter-regional differences in the integration experience. This regional distinctness of both domestic and integration variables, in turn, promotes clustered Europeanization