Jean Monnet Chair in Parliamentary Democracy and European Integration
The sixth edition of the Jean Monnet Chair in Parliamentary Democracy and European Integration newsletter
News
We are delighted to welcome Mr Sean O'Curneen Cañas, Secretary General of the RenewEurope group within the EU's Committee of the Regions, and a graduate of Birkbeck's MSc programme in European Politics, to the Chair's Advisory Panel.
Recent events
Our sixth event of the year took place on 21 April 2022 and took the form of a roundtable entitled 'In conversation with Prof. Luuk van Middelaar (Leiden University)'. The video recording is available here.
The sixth event of the past academic year was the annual Jean Monnet lecture (postponed from last February due to strike action taken by academics across the UK) that was delivered on 6 June 2022 by one of the most eminent contemporary philosophers, namely Professor Philippe Van Parijs (Hoover Chair, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve; Oxford; EUI). Its title was "Europe: a utopian project whose inevitable destiny is failure?" The video recording will be made available soon.
Our final event of the academic year was a two-day online conference on Architecture and the Institutions of the EU (27 and 28 June 2022) and involved architects (including two who have actually designed purpose-built buildings occupied by EU institutions, EU officials who work on building projects, EU officials who utilise these buildings and academic experts who specialise in the study of the operation of EU institutions. They discussed the interplay between choices made by architects and the actual operation of these institutions. The corresponding video recordings are available here (session 1), here (session 2), here (session 3) and here (session 4).
Forthcoming events
We are in the process of finalising this year's programme of events. These will include not only the annual Jean Monnet lecture (planned for spring 2023) but also the annual teacher training event (planned for January 2023), a research workshop on the Spitzenkandidaten process involving the academics who will contribute to the corresponding book that will be published in 2023 under the direction of Matilde Ceron, Thomas Christiansen and Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos (see below), as well as other events that will be announced in due course.
The first event of the 2022-23 academic year is a research workshop on Europe's ports organised on the initiative of Dr David Styan (Politics, Birkbeck) and involving experts from several European countries.
Teaching
Teaching will commence on 3 October 2022. This year too we will offer the full range of Jean Monnet modules at both the postgraduate and undergraduate levels though in the case of the former the module will be split into two so as to fit in Birkbeck's new mode of module delivery.
Research
Dr D. G. Dimitrakopoulos has continued his work on the Spitzenkandidaten system and, in particular, how each European party federation selects its Spitzenkandidat. This is part of the aforementioned collective project that he co-directs along with colleagues from LUISS in Rome and will be presented at the forthcoming workshop that we will host at Birkbeck on 24-25 November 2022. Over the summer he also published five op-eds in two leading Greek newspapers (one of the costs of unanimous decision making in the EU here, two on parliamentary accountability in Greece here and here, one on independent regulatory authorities in Greece here and one on issues regarding media freedom in Greece and how they relate to the operation of democracy here).