Europeanization

There is no doubt that the concept of Europeanization as applied to EU foreign policy has a growing academic profile. A rudimentary search of Google Scholar, for example, reveals that the concept, linked to foreign policy, was cited in just over 200 scholarly publications in 2000, in 800 such publications by 2005 and over 1,800 academic publications in 2013. However, this very growth has led to criticism. Europeanization has been censured as the poster child for concept-stretching (Radaelli, 2000), as being poorly and confusingly defined (Mair, 2004) and for having limited explanatory capacity, either by reason of lacking parsimony in its measurement (Lodge, 2006) or as a result of confusion over its causal status (Wong and Hill, 2011). These concerns result in the worst possible scholarly criticism – that Europeanization is simply an academic fad, devoid of substantial conceptual utility (Olsen, 2003; Moumoutzis, 2011).