Abstract
The mutual relations between the European Union (EU) and its member-states have come to be termed “Europeanization”. This new European study agenda has been referred to widely in European political science literature. However, no common standard has been established for its definition, its analytical objectives and its approaches.
Considering such these approaches, this paper firstly examines a historical overview of the studies of the Europeanization of the EU policy process, which contain both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. The former stands for the upload direction—how member states influence the EU—and the latter refers to the EU's download impacts on member states.
This article then indicates that the Europeanization of the EU policy-process itself has theoretical problems: (1) divergent policy areas that are sector-based and differentiated by each member-state; (2) a normative division between EU and member-states competences (subsidiarity); and (3) European citizens who belong to both the EU and individual memberstates.
Historically, the focus on the relations between the EU and memberstates has transferred from a bottom-up perspective to a top-down approach. The turning point could be observed in the 1990s when several European-wide dynamics emerged after the launch of the internal market. Since the 1990s, theoretical background has contributed to the development of Europeanization studies: the rediscovery of the importance of nation-states in EU studies; the introduction of a new institutional approach toward the policy-process; and the embrace of a governance approach. Here the author cites three representative papers: (a) “the Europeanization of national interest groups” by T. Tanaka (1984); (b) “Europeification” debate by S. S. Andersen and K. A. Eliassen (1993); and (c) “The Europeanization of national policy” by S. J. Bulmer and C. M. Radaelli (2005).
However, none of those papers precisely responds to the questions mentioned above about divergent policy areas, subsidiarity, and European citizens. Among these three, the author evaluates the “Europeification” approach, because it includes the idea of power-sharing between the EC/EU and member-states for the understanding of subsidiarity and has more process-oriented concepts than the others.
