Difference Between Europeanization And European Integration

Name: Umut Işık

Student ID: 1798289

Instructor: Başak Kale

Subject: “How does Europeanization literature explain the process of European integration? Is there a difference between European integration and Europeanization? Discuss.”

Europeanization and European Integration

Introduction:

As a relatively new research field, Europeanization and its literature can be traced back to late 1990’s and early 2000’s when it became popular among scholars. It can be said that Europeanization emerged out of necessity which was felt by the scholars who were in a search for explaining European integration process in a greater scale, due to the fact that, there was an overwhelming phenomenon, which created a very unstable situation and highly unpredictable

European Union and its member states are the main actors of the integration process. In order to understand the motive behind the integration, one should examine the history of European integration. European integration process was initiated because of geopolitical considerations which France had in her agenda towards Germany in terms of preventing any possibility of a continental war since two of those wars nearly destroyed almost all countries that attended those wars both economically and structurally if not politically. Integration of interests in Western Europe was seen as the ideal way of channeling German economic power to a long-term initiation which was led by France politically. The first step of this project was establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951. It is also important to know that rebuilding of Western European economies was also important for two major reasons which one of them was internal to the Western Europe while the other was external. The internal reason was blocking the growing power of labor movements by creating economic stability. The external reason which was also supported by the Americans was to prevent the Soviet influence over the continent by not only creating economic stability but also containing Franco-German

The European Economic Community (EEC) was created with this treaty and tariffs were eliminated in accordance with the Treaty of Rome by 1968. The first major opposition to the Treaty of Rome was brought from France with General Charles De Gaulle’s rise to the power. Basically, De Gaulle was opposed to the idea of the EEC as a ‘supranational’ organization that operates at the expense of sovereignty of the nation states. De Gaulle’s intergovernmental set of agenda created a major setback for the integration process which also blocked the British entry to the Union and continued during De Gaulle’s administration. After the demise of the Bretton Woods system, however, attempts like the European Monetary System (EMS) and the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) tried to provide an economic integration environment for the Union which were led by the West Germany in 1979 (Georgiou, 2010). The following decade witnessed the Single European Act (1986) and the birth of the EMU as a future phenomenon in the literature of the EU financial market. French president François Mitterrand’s attempt to gain some degree of control over the European economic atmosphere via the EMU was accepted by the Germans in order to ease the reunification process of two German States in 1990. As Garton Ash (2012) explains the situation that the Germans were in with one sentence; “As one