ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book. The book expresses that domestic representations of Europe and the European Union and the direction and the extent of Europeanization are mutually constitutive. It also expresses that the meta-theoretical and theoretical premises of poststructuralism, the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe in particular, offer a critical perspective on the existing Europeanization research and enable the understanding of Europeanization as a relational process. The book focuses on a dual ontological position grounded in Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory. It explores how competing articulations of the EU and its norms constructed state territoriality in debates of countries candidates for EU membership. The book explains the four divergent ideal-type meta-discourses on Europe in relation to statehood were determined – the economic community, the political community, the federal state, and the multilevel polity.
