Abstract
Europeanization is like one of those bumblebees that seem to defy the laws of aerodynamics, yet they fly. In 2002, Johan Olsen was lamenting that, several years after his seminal paper on Europeanization and Nation State Dynamics (Olsen, 1995), political scientists were still debating about concepts and definitions (Olsen, 2002). Each author, he argued, appeared to go on with their own concepts and frameworks in mind, and merrily ignore more substantive questions concerning how exactly Europeanization is changing politics and policy at the domestic level. Hussein Kassim (cited by Olsen, 2002) had concluded in 2000 that such an unwieldy field did not deserve too much attention, suggesting the futility of the whole exercise. In the end, Olsen reasoned, Europeanization may be nothing but an attention-directing device.