Revisiting Europeanization in Southeast Europe. An Historical Approach

ended

The future of Europe will vitally depend on its ability to transform and unify the continent. Southeast Europe, with its complex historical trajectories and its own particularistic Europeanness, has been labelled difficult to Europeanize. Yet, Europeanization in Southeast Europe has a far longer history reaching back into the 19th century and earlier. The main goal of the RESEE project is to establish Europeanization research on the Southeast Europe as a complex historically grounded process, firstly through developing a meaningful narrative integration of the prevailing knowledge in the historical dimension of Europeanization of Southeast Europe; secondly through discussing the usefulness of Europeanization and its related process bringing historical cases of how Europe has influenced Southeast Europe and vice versa; and thirdly through tracing the process back we build an explanatory model that maps the events and actors, the causal mechanisms and factors that interact when a specific historical Europeanization process unfolds in Southeast Europe. RESEE is an innovative project studying a long and much disputed ‘European otherness periphery’ contributing to the rethinking of the region in such a reflexive way that it have meaning and utility in the current EU political project of European Integration. RESEE main academic outputs include a Living Review on the literature, a course proposal and a workshop on the historical dimension of Europeanization on Southeast Europe, a policy paper on best-practices of successful historical cases of Europeanization in Southeast Europe and a number of other dissemination and communication activities. These outputs will attract the attention of academia, policy-makers and also European society since they are a valuable source of scholarly knowledge; they expose high policy relevance to practitioners and they have societal importance in particular to improving citizens perceptions on Southeast Europe and European Integration.