A concept that is worth looking into is the concept of
Europeanization, which since the 1990s has attracted
renewed attention from political scientists specializing in
European integration. The Europeanization process reveals
in a suggestive way the interconnectivity between the two
grand theories. Thus, Europeanization is seen as a two-way
interaction between the national and the European
(Papadimitriou, Phinnemore 2003, 3) or, in other words, as a
merger of the top-down (neofunctionalism) and bottom-up
(intergovernmentalism) approaches. This portrays
Europeanization as “an ongoing, interactive and mutually
constitutive process of change linking national and
European levels, where the responses of the MS to the integration process feed back into the EU institutions and
policy processes and vice versa” (Major 2005, 177).