The Politics of Time: The Temporality of EU Enlargement and Europeanisation

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The politics of time are central to understanding modern governance, yet they have rarely been the subject of systematic enquiry. The politics of time are concerned with rules that structure the time, timing and tempo of institutional and policy development; and temporal governing devices - such as calendars, timetables, or roadmaps - that are employed to enforce such rules. The present project is designed to advance our empirical, conceptual and theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. Empirically, the project analyses the politics of time in relation to recent and prospective enlargements of the European Union, which posed special challenges of multi-level synchronisation. This research is based on a comparative design (i) across levels of decision-taking: EU (enlargement), domestic (Europeanisation), and sectoral (transitional derogations); (ii) across countries: Poland and Slovakia (first GEE enlargement); Bulgaria (second GEE enlargement); and Turkey; and (iii) traces the politics of time from the early 1990s to 2008/9. Conceptually, the project aims to refine key terms in temporal analysis so as to make them readily operationalisable; to develop conceptual maps of temporal rules and of temporal governing devices; and to specify the properties of the politics of time in EU governance. Theoretically, the projects seeks to explain the evolution of temporal rules and related temporal governing devices under the specific conditions of multilevel linkage and institutional flux which characterise the EU governance setting. In so doing, it makes a major contribution to the study of the temporality of modern governance.