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Abstract

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Union (EU) has reinvigorated its enlargement agenda, bringing renewed focus to the complexities of Europeanisation via enlargement. This article argues for a new relational approach to Europeanisation via enlargement, which allows us to fully capture the political and relational dynamics of the process. In doing so, I seek to shift the focus from outcomes-driven analyses that tend to take the EU for granted, to an analysis driven by the core research question: How are the tensions generated within the political integration process and how are they negotiated? Reconceptualizing enlargement as a process of negotiated transitions, the relational approach highlights how EU rules, norms, and values are co-constructed, contested, and redefined through ongoing transactions between the EU and candidate countries. It embraces the interdependencies between actors and policy fields, while challenging assumptions about EU hegemony and the static nature of European values. By foregrounding the political dimensions of the Europeanisation process, the relational approach argues for a long-durée analysis that emphasizes outcome-in-process. This allows for the introduction of the concept of ‘tactical Europeanisation’ to illustrate how candidate countries, through acts of doublespeak, navigate and instrumentalize EU conditions, performing alignment with EU norms externally while domestically hollowing them out. Ultimately, this article provides a critical lens to EU enlargement, de-centring the EU, and taking candidate countries’ agency seriously, while placing the enlargement process within its wider international context.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D901 Europe (General) D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics D History General and Old World > DL Northern Europe. Scandinavia J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JZ International relations
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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