European or Not? The Representations of the States’ Europeanness and Europe in the EU Institutions’ Discourse

According to Article 49 of the Treaty on the European Union, a state has to be “European” in order to be considered eligible to EU membership. Yet, this qualifier has not been clearly and precisely defined in EU law although it can take on various meanings. There exist indeed in the public space many narratives of the notion of Europe, and of related notions such as Europeanness, that have been built by various actors. The EU political institutions are part of these actors since they have had to pronounce themselves on what is a “European State”, especially in the framework of EU accession when they dealt with membership requests and enlargement opportunities. By relying on a corpus made up of various institutional documents (opinions, speeches, communications, reports, …), this paper first explains the representations of the states’ Europeanness and, by extension, of Europe that has been found out in the EU institutions’ discourse since the inception of the European integration process. Then, it analyses the distribution and evolution of the various representations per institution and per period. The paper eventually discusses how the EU institutions relies on existing narratives of the notions Europe and European identity to assess the states’ Europeanness, which (re)shapes a new discourse on Europe and European identity.