ABSTRACT
Despite the increasing importance of Europe for and its impact on the EU
Member States, political science discovered the phenomenon of Europeanisation
rather late. For quite some time, scholars focused on the process of European
integration, trying to answer the question why sovereign states decide to
cooperate evermore closely and to set up supranational institutions towhich they
transfer part of their sovereignty. Thus, they were mainly interested in a bottom-
up perspective on European integration. Accordingly, the great integration the-
ories, namely neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism, were mainly
concerned with the role of the Member States at the European level.6 It was only
in the early 1990s that things began to change and scholars started to be increas-
ingly interested in the impact of the integration process on the Member States,
because this simply could not be ignored any longer. Since the Single European
Act of 1986, the policy-making competencies of the EC/EU have become more comprehensive, and more policy areas are influenced by policies ‘made in Brus-
sels or Strasbourg’. Each year, the EU produces around 500 political decisions,
directives and regulations. This does not just affect policies; it also affects
Member States’ politics and polities.
