The EU

Tatyana Bajenova In the recent article Rescaling expertise in EU policy-making: European think tanks and their reliance on symbolic, political and network capital (Bajenova 2019) that appeared in the Globalisation, Societies and Education Journal, Tatyana Bajenova has examined the strategies which think tanks (TTs) employ to influence EU decision-making. Unlike some recent studies of European […]

 Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash   This blog entry is a follow-up to the research agenda published last month. It presents further details of the research project. It captures the evolving complexity of the research project since the most recent reflections on Bourdieusian influences in the EU studies have encouraged embracing not just one of the overall three taxonomies […]

Scholars often look at international organizations, such as the European Union (EU), in splendid isolation. Over the last decade, however, researchers have paid more attention to how international organizations interact and what this means for international cooperation.

As we await decisions on extensions and general elections, I thought we might step back and consider the question of how the UK might behave during its remaining time as a member state. In the run-up to the new extension, there was much talk from Leave MPs and activists in Westminster about trying to sabotage […]

The process of differentiated integration explicitly separates insiders and outsiders into different institutions. Within the Eurozone crisis, the institutional separation between ‘euro-ins’ and ‘euro-outs’ reached a new high. Alexander Schilin takes a social constructivist approach to reexamine the relationship between differentiated integration and interpersonal separation within the EU.

The longstanding “duopoly” between the two major parties is over: The 9th European Parliament (2019-2024) will have a political centre that is both larger and more multi-coloured, with more broadly liberal or green Members. Populist Radical Right Parties gained in weight, too, but their success was – overall – significantly smaller than expected.

A new Jean Monnet Project launches to promote diversity, inclusion and multidisciplinarity in European Studies.

At 8pm last night, the government published the legislation for Boris Johnson’s proposed Brexit deal. The Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) is 115 pages long and has an extra 126 pages of explanatory notes. MPs have just 24 hours to digest this WAB before casting their first key votes on it later tonight. The legislation is […]

Patrik Taufar argues that taking a decentring approach to the EU’s human rights policies may promote engagement and ensure the effectiveness of the policy. He frames this argument within the question of the future of Europe and what steps must be taken to ensure the existence of ‘a next European century’.

“In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in […]