The European Union’s third sector shows five clusters of civil society organizations with complex bonds and ties with the surrounding societies and national identities.
We will analyze in a first part these five clusters, Continental, Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, Mediterranean and Oriental, according to their political, social and economic background and main features and use the data issued from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Non-profit Sector Project (Salamon et al., 2004).
The second part of this paper is devoted to the question of a likely convergent evolution of these five clusters, according to a mimetic movement that we can observe in the European Commission’s policy to disseminate the “best practices” but also as a bottom-up trend of civil society organizations working cross-country.