Euro area entry in east-central Europe: Paradoxical Europeanisation and clustered convergence

Economic and Monetary Union offers a useful case study for critically examining Europeanisation and conditionality as explanatory variables for the euro entry strategies of east-central European states. This article highlights the paradoxes of extreme and limited Europeanisation and of extreme 'formal' and 'informal' conditionality with multiple sources of uncertainty. These paradoxes have provided the context within which east-central European governments have evolved political strategies for the temporal management of euro entry. These strategies reflect in turn different 'clusters' of convergence in the Baltic States, the Visegrad states, and Slovenia. Euro Area accession in east-central Europe offers insights not just into how Europeanisation works in a central political issue area but also into the temporal management of EU policy and 'clustered' convergence.