Europeanization is a fairly recent concept which has been widely – although often loosely – used as a fitting framework in order to grasp the contemporary EU-related changes affecting national policies and politics. Adding a long term dimension to the definition of Europeanization as a set of “feedback loops and complex causal relations” between domestic and European dynamics (Radaelli and Saurugger, 2008; see also Palier, Surel et al, 2007), this paper critically assesses the structuring/destructuring dichotomy most famously promoted by Maurizio Ferrera, by focusing on the case of health policies in France and Sweden. While the post-war period is clearly a time of “internal bonding” within national Welfare States, I provide historical evidence that the supposedly correlated “external bounding” was more permeable than it is stated in retrospect. As an example, French administrative and medical actors promoted as early as 1952-54 a short-lived project of a comprehensive pan-European Community of Health (also called White Pool) and participated in relatively far-reaching transnational cooperations (such as the unified sanitary space in 1949) and numerous common programs up to the 1980s – many of them leading to a limited but genuine Europeanization. The Swedish health system in the 1950-1980s presents an interesting case, as it seemed to confirm the “binding/bonding” combination in the early 1950s, only to become more and more integrated within the Nordic area in the mid-1950s. To be sure, a new wave of Europeanization occurred in the late 1990s, opening limited exit options, but I argue that this phenomenon has to be mitigated in regard to long term trends of Europeanization.
