Europeanisation as Discursive Process: Urban Constructions of Europe and the Local Implementation of EU Directives

Abstract:

Constructivist approaches to European integration maintain that the meaning of ‘the EU’ is a variable artefact contingent upon context-specific social practices. However, in Europeanisation scholarship, this premise has not yet settled, with the EU typically being treated as an objective reality constituting either adaptational pressures or windows of opportunities for domestic politics. This applies also to the research on the Europeanisation of cities which neglects what Europe means locally. This article addresses this question by proposing a discourse-analytical conceptualisation which investigates the interdependency of urban discursive practices and the political processes of dealing with EU directives. Using the empirical examples of Frankfurt and Dortmund, it is shown how ‘the EU’ is discursively constructed and how these constructions constitute specific spaces of possibilities for implementing the EU directive on ambient air quality. The analysis reveals that cities feature distinct stocks of knowledge which help to explain the locally varying processes of Europeanisation.