ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses concrete questions of methodology and research design. It addresses how poststructuralism's meta-theoretical and theoretical considerations can be applied to the relationship between domestic understandings of the European Union and domestic political and policy processes. The chapter also discusses the choice of analyzing Europeanization of territoriality discourses within policy debates on territorial reforms in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and then in Croatia. The Czech Republic and Slovakia share an institutional legacy in state administration, which is the result of a common history when together they made up Czechoslovakia. The chapter analyses the choice of an inductive approach to delimiting central discourses that define Europeanization. Discourse analysis examines what the EU does to the domestic conception of territoriality. The EU's multilevel governance, as a form of a heterarchic organization of power, stands in opposition to national demands for sovereignty and state-centrism as a defining discourse of post-communist transition.
