French foreign policy and the limits of Europeanisation.

This article focuses on the changing French position on EU enlargement.
The aim of the analysis is to study the interplay between the foreign policy of the EU
and the foreign policy of France, but also between the official French foreign policy and
the French public opinion. Most of the literature on EU enlargement underestimates the
importance of public opinion. This article is therefore an attempt to present a more comprehensive
understanding of the changing French position on enlargement by combining
a top down with a bottom up approach. By doing this the analysis do not consider
whether enlargement is good or bad, but rather how a member state’s position on this
issue may change both through a process of Europeanisation and as a result of changes
in domestic public opinion.