Adapting to Europe? Business interests and civil society groups in accession countries

While the Europeanisation of national interest groups is an important research agenda in the EU, very little research examines their Europeanisation outside the EU, and during the EU accession process. The article fills this gap by focusing on Europeanisation of interest groups in Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Using new survey data, the article looks at interest groups’ involvement in the national pre-accession process, and their activity at the EU level. The main argument of the paper stresses the absence of significant differences between the levels of Europeanisation of business and other types of interest groups (especially NGOs) in the current phase of EU accession. The regression analyses provide support to this argument, showing that access to national institutions, resources, the Europeanisation of policy areas and dependence on EU funding account for interest groups’ levels of Europeanisation, while variations across group types are not very significant.