Economic and Social Integration in the EU and Beyond – Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Jean Monnet ad personam chair)

Start date: 1 September 2011
End date: 31 August 2014
Primary investigator: Professor Dagmar Schiek
Postgraduate students: Andrea Gideon, Michael Randall

Taking "Economic and Social Integration in the EU" as its overarching focus, this project returns to the motivating question for the founding of the European Economic Community in the 1950s: whether and how economic integration can trigger integrating societies. Today’s EU still pursues economic integration as an instrument to achieve, among others, social integration.

Alas, tensions between economic and social aspects of EU integration abound, at times threatening to undermine the EU’s more prestigious projects, such as the Euro. Social reality tends to be complex and to evade one-dimensional answers. However, if the question how to reconcile economic and social integration remains unanswered, the EU will cease to engage its citizens.

As the EU is frequently called a Community of Law, its legal order will have to contribute to answers. Hence the project focuses on the interaction of EU law with politics and society, seeking to establish an inspiring research and learning environment and offering the opportunity to reflect on European Law and legal studies within processes of globalisation, and the EU’s contribution to enhancing global justice.

It aims to ...

establish interdisciplinary research networks in European studies
offer access to research presentations to civil society
offer specific training to postgraduate researchers.

It offers ...

a series of academic seminars and a connected series of researcher training seminars in EU studies, and connected activities for undergraduate students
opportunities to publish work in progress on line
a Summer School in EU Law

Publications

'Governing the Social Dimension in Canadian Federalism and European Integration' Verdun, A. and Wood, D.E. (2014) OSE Paper Series, Research Paper No.14, May 2014, 22p.
The Dysfunctional Nature of the Economic and Monetary Union [PDF]

Dagmar Schiek (ed.), The EU Economic and Social Model in the Global Crisis: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Ashgate, Farnham 2013)