European or Not? The Commission’s Discourse on the States’ Europeanness in the Framework of EU Accession

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 and dimensions. There exists indeed many representations of Europe and European identity that have been promoted by various actors in the public space, some representations being well established and others coming close to being myths. The EU institutions are one of these actors since they have had to pronounce themselves on what is a “European State” when they received membership requests and when they considered enlargement opportunities. In this process of assessing a state’s Europeanness, the Commission especially plays an important role by delivering opinions to the Council and by communicating on the requesting state’s eligibility. Building on discourse analysis, this paper first presents the dimensions of the states’ Europeanness that have been provided in the Commission’s discourse on EU accession. The corpus is made up of public documents (opinions, communications and speeches delivered by Presidents of the Commission) that have been drafted within the framework of membership requests and enlargements since the inception of European political integration. Then, the distribution and evolution of the various dimensions are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The paper eventually discusses how the Commission relies on existing representations of Europe and European identity to shape and promote an institutional discourse on which states are European or not, as well as how the latter takes part in (re)shaping the notions of Europe and European identity.