Time and European Governance: An Inventory Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling School of Politics and International Relations University of Nottingham j.meyer-sahling@nottingham.ac.uk May 2007 Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the European Studies Association, Panel ‘The Temporality of Europeanisation and Enlargement’, Montreal/Canada, 17 – 20 May 2007 Introduction This paper examines conceptual issues in the study of time and European governance. It briefly outlines the main themes in the study of time, temporality and European governance and then turns to an exploration of various conceptual dimensions that are discussed in the literature on the politics of time, the literature on the sociology of time and research on time in organisations and management. The aim is first of all to run an inventory of usages of time and temporality in the social science literature in order to prepare the ground for the identification of key questions and for the conceptualisation of the temporality of European governance, in particular, the temporality of Enlargement and Europeanisation. 1 The paper suggests that there is relatively little research in the area of European governance that is genuinely interested in the concept of time and how it matters for European governance. Research that explicitly refers to time tends to use it as a methodological device rather than as a variable that affects political outcomes. Yet, there are only few attempts to conceptualise time as a variable for the study of European governance (an important exception is Ekengren 2002). In many respects, this state of affairs is surprising. The work by Schedler and Santiso (1998), Linz (1998), and Schmitter/Santiso (1998) on democratic politics suggests that issues of time, timing and tempo matter a great deal for the quality of democracy and for political outcomes more generally. Moreover, practitioners seem to be often much more concerned with aspects of temporality than 1 European governance could be referred to as the study of EU integration and enlargement, the study of political processes and outcomes at the supranational level and the Europeanisation of member states and candidate states. Bearing in mind the title of the conference panel, the paper focuses on enlargement and Europeanisation. Yet, some examples that concern EU-level politics are included. By contrast, the EU integration dimension still receives far too little attention in this paper. 1