Paper Titles & Abstracts

The proposed paper documents and analyzes limits for external Europeanization, basing on the case of regional integration in East Africa. East African Community, most advanced regional bloc in Africa, has been chosen to confront European model of integration with idea of federalism developed in this region. The article seeks to move beyond traditional explanations of relatively limited impact of European model of integration on African states, and proposes an alternative framework of analysis, where external pressures and models are compared with more demanding expectations on the African side. Secondly, it claims that lack of membership perspective is not necessarily a decisive stumbling block for exporting the regional integration, but greater emphasis should be put on the political side of regional integration. Existing literature on external Europeanization often overlooks the regional integration as a political project, where economic benefits might come in the longer term, and are secondary to some other purposes as political unity or regional identity. The shape and scope of the very idea of model transfer from the EU to other regions have been conditioned by EU internal variables , which have more importance for model's recipients than economic well being in the region. Thus effects of external Europeanization might be mitigated not only by inability of the African states to adopt the European model, coming from the economic or technological backwardness, but unconvincing idea of the EU as a still ongoing project. Finally, the article identifies elements of federalistic ideas embedded in the external Europeanization, as promoting of decentralization, and proposes scope conditions for effective policy transfer, suggesting a tailor-made approach in the promotion of the European model worldwide.