Paolo Roberto Graziano - Europeanization and Domestic Policy Change: The Case of Italy

Over the past 15 years Europeanization has been an increasingly investigated political phenomenon. As we will further discuss in the following sections, Europeanization entered the scene after a long period of neofunctionalist versus intergovernmentalist struggle, which by the end of the 1990s seemed to have lost part of its analytical appeal (Risse-Kappen 1996). In fact, prior to Europeanization debates, the European political organization (todays European Union) had attracted rising interest among political science scholars. Surely, since the late 1950s European studies as a somewhat specialized discipline has become increasingly relevant in both international relations and in comparative politics (Jupille and Caporaso 1999). For almost 40 years, the main theoretical and empirical debates concerned the formation and consolidation of the new European polity, and the main focus regarded the ways through which the European political organization was set up. The ontological phase of the scholarly analysis (ibid.) regarded primarily the nature of the beast (Risse-Kappen 1996): what kind of supranational political organization was the emerging European organization? In Jupille and Caporasos reading, the approaches used by US scholars of the EU have been substantially different from the analytical lenses developed by European scholars:

American students of the EU have predominantly used the toolkit of IR. They have focused on the ways in which sovereign states have come together and () created a set of rules permitting them collectively to achieve outcomes unavailable to them individually. () Europeans, by contrast, have tended to use analytical tools drawn from policy analysis or public administration, more reminiscent of comparative politics.