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Commentary: Europeanization, the Third Sector and the Other Civil Society

Jeremy Kendall provides a good overview of how the European Union (EU) and the third sector relates to each other through several processes that can fit under a broad definition of ‘Europeanization’. He shows how the third sector developed as an issue on the European policy agenda, dependent on institutional legacies at the national level and describes the formation of a horizontal third sector policy community at the EU level. This European attention to the third sector affects in turn the horizontal third sector policy at the national level as one would expect in a multi-level polity, although the effects appear modest. Kendall’s article, based on the TSEP project, is particularly welcome as studies on the third sector, mainly comparative in nature, have until now been rather detached from the European integration literature. Kendall builds bridges between the third sector and the European Studies academic communities by placing third sector developments in two broader dynamics that have attracted wide attention in the European integration debate over the last decade, namely the EU’s (claimed) engagement with civil society and processes of Europeanization. On the one hand, this enriches the European integration literature with an empirically dense overview of the EU’s relation to the third sector. On the other hand, it offers third sector analysts access to the broader contextual debate and some analytical tools provided by the European integration literature. Our objective is to develop this latter element by placing Kendall’s analysis more clearly in the broader civil society debate that has characterized both the academic literature and the discourse of the European institutions.