The Limits of Europe: Membership Norms and the Contestation of Regional Integration

This book was conceived out of a hunch that the construction of Europe, including the evolving community’s territorial expansion, was more deeply contested than one would conclude from the official narrative in recent decades about enduring commitments to democracy and human rights. The challenge was two- fold—how to use the theories and methods of political science and the vast resources available in the EU’s many historical archives to analyse and explain the arc of EU constitutionalization and enlargement over time, and how to do so in a manner that also speaks to regional integration processes in other parts of the world.

To this end, I decided to focus not on states’ decisions to seek membership nor on the community’s readiness to admit particular applicant states, but on the more fundamental and long- neglected question of how a regional community decides which states are eligible for membership. This focus would reveal a great deal, I suspected, about how political actors understand the nature and the limits of the regional community that they are building and re- building with every decision they make. Such a study of the conceptual and geographic limits of Europe acquired a whole new significance as debates over cultural identity gained salience across the community.