I. NWO VENI project on ‘Explaining Europe’s failure to deal with authoritarian regimes: Which actors make and break effective democracy promotion?’, coordinated by Dr Giselle Bosse
The goal of the research project, which started back in February 2013, is to examine the role and impact of non-state actors in the EU’s relations with autocratic regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. More specifically, the project aims at explaining to what extent and under which conditions actors from the private sector, such as large national and multinational companies, exert an influence on the policies of the EU towards the autocratic governments of Belarus, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. The research draws on Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and related works. It thereby takes a distinct critical theory approach to analyzing the processes through which the EU and its member states arrive at decisions on policies towards autocratic regimes. This perspective draws attention inter alia to the ability of private economic actors to manipulate and/or bypass supposedly transparent, inclusive and ‘truth-seeking’ oriented communicative (decision-making) processes at the national and supranational levels. In essence, this research departs from evaluating the effectiveness of the EU’s policies to assessing whether such policies – in terms of output and decision-making process – can be considered ‘just’, ‘right’ and ‘fair’ from a normative point of view.
The research project has allowed Dr Bosse and her team of Research Assistants to conduct extensive field research in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (as well as in Brussels and other EU capitals). Among the output of the research project are a monograph and several articles/book chapters. The first works to be published in 2016 include chapters in ‘The Routledge Handbook on the ENP’ (T. Schumacher, ed.) and in ‘The ENP in a Comparative Perspective’ (S. Gstöhl & E. Lannon, eds.), and an article in the journal East European Politics.
In addition, the research has been/is disseminated to relevant non-academic stakeholders (e.g. policy briefs for the Eastern Europe Studies Centre, the European Parliament (European People’s Party) and The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (with D. Baltag). The research has also been quoted in leading European media outlets, for example Euronews, AFP Global News Agency, Libération, Le Matin and the Austrian Handelsblatt.
II. NWO Aspasia Grant
The NWO has awarded an Aspasia grant to Christine Arnold in 2014. The grant was set up by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands and NWO. The grant will run for five years and will help support the research projects of Arnold.
In the academic year 2014-2015, enabled by the grant, Arnold was a visiting scholar at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California in Berkeley. During her stay at UC Berkeley, she worked on the question of the democratic linkage between voters and representatives in the European Union. She worked on two projects in parallel. In one project she examined the extent to which voters are able to place the policy positions of parties during the European Parliament election campaigns.
In the second project she analyzed the extent to which the Council Summit Conclusions correspond to the policy preferences of public opinion. In the coming year she will use the Aspasia grant to work on a book project, “Political Representation in the European Union”. The monograph will address the concern of political representation across the three key policy-making institutions of the European Union, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission. Furthermore, it will assess the degree of representation based on the output of the institutions. The question of how governments can better connect with their citizens has become a central concern for national and European policy-makers. In recent years, this question has gained in urgency with the economic crisis and the subsequent challenges to democratic institutions and politics at the national and European levels.
There are two key questions that Arnold will address in her research: To what extent are the representatives of the EU institutions responsive to the policy preferences of the public? And with regard to policy output are there differences across EU institutions?
III. The European Commission awards Kiran Klaus Patel with a Jean Monnet Chair
Kiran Klaus Patel has been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair. From September 2015 until August 2018, this award by the European Union will allow Patel to strengthen the historical dimension and the interdisciplinary profile of the faculty’s European Studies programmes and to launch a new research project. Patel’s teaching activities in this context will concentrate on the BA European Studies, the Research Master European Studies, and the Honours Programme. In research, he has started to work on a project on the history of the European Union’s external relations during the Cold War together with colleagues from the European University Institute in Florence. A first workshop has taken place at November 26-27, 2015 in Maastricht.
“The Jean Monnet Chair will allow us to create great synergies with HOMER, CERiM, and other recent funding successes in this field,” says Patel. The Department of History at FASoS already has one of the world’s largest research groups working on European integration history. The newly awarded Jean Monnet Chair is a recognition of this work, and a platform to deepen and expand these activities further.
