Upcoming Events

Nov
16
Thu
2023
Europe’s long twentieth century @ Sala Belvedere, Villa Schifanoia
Nov 16 @ 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Europe’s long twentieth century @ Sala Belvedere, Villa Schifanoia
Join Peo Hansen, Linköping University, in the next ‘Europe in the World’ seminar series
The lecture takes its point of departure in the EU’s current geopolitical turn. For many scholars and commentators, this turn is hugely significant since it supposedly marks a shift away from the EU’s uniquely liberal approach to world affairs. Equally important, by openly embracing ‘hard power’ Brussels is also severing the continuity between the present rhetoric and its founding narrative about the EU as an anti-geopolitical peace project. But as will be shown, what appears to be a break with the past is, in fact, a reunion with the past. The current debate is thus not new but echoes earlier calls for a geopolitics of European unity that commenced already in the pre-World War I period. Indeed, today’s geopolitical affirmation follows in the very footsteps of the EU’s founders. Few contemporary scholars and policy makers know that the EU, when it was established in 1957, constituted a vast imperial polity that annexed France’s and Belgium’s African colonies and fully incorporated French Algeria. The founders stressed the community’s huge extra-European scope and natural sphere of influence, which was designated as ‘Eurafrica’. By bringing present and past into dialogue, the lecture explains why the EU’s turn to geopolitics – its quest for ‘strategic autonomy’, its attempt stem Europe’s declining global power – remains stuck in what has proven to be a very long twentieth century.
Nov
23
Thu
2023
Navigating regime complexes, but how? The external dimension of EU crisis politics @ Sala Belvedere, Villa Schifanoia
Nov 23 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Navigating regime complexes, but how? The external dimension of EU crisis politics @ Sala Belvedere, Villa Schifanoia
Join Berthold Rittberger in the next ‘Europe in the World’ seminar series

Over the past decades, the European Union (EU) has confronted multiple crises, which have required swift political responses from EU institutions and member states. While there is ample literature about the EU’s internal responses to the ‘polycrisis’, we possess much less systematic knowledge on how the EU interacts with external actors and institutions to address crisis challenges. Since the EU does not act in an institutional vacuum, but is part of wider, issue-specific regime complexes, it has cultivated diverse relationships with other international organisations (IOs) across a multitude of issues. We assume that during periods of political crisis marked by conditions of threat, uncertainty, and urgency, IOs – including the EU – have strong incentives to complement internal crisis responses with external ones. We argue that crisis-induced interactions among IO-dyads can come in different forms: pooling, division of labor, competition and co-existence. The incidence of each of these four external crisis interactions among IO-dyads is influenced by the degree of mandate and membership overlap on the one hand, and the extent of goal convergence in response crisis-related policy challenges on the other hand. We offer an empirical mapping and analysis of the different external crisis interactions by drawing on the following crisis interactions among the EU and other IOs: pooling among the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to address the sovereign debt crisis; division of labor among EU and NATO in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine; competition among the EU and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the context of the migration crisis; co-existence among the EU and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in the context of managing the financial fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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