Do you wonder what the European Union is all about? What challenges it faces and whether and how it can manage them? How will the decade and a half long of crises reshape Europe? This is the course for you!
In this course, we will introduce you to key concepts and historical turning points, which have shaped contemporary Europe. What is national sovereignty and can it be shared? What impact has the 1989 collapse of communism had on Europe and is the East-West divide still relevant today? And finally, what is the best size for a political unit?
The eurozone crisis raised question marks about the EU as a vehicle for economic prosperity, the refugee crisis undermined Europe’s social cohesion, Brexit resulted in a Europe that is smaller and less impactful geopolitically, and the Russian war against Ukraine has tested the limits of EU power. This course will address these challenges without fear or favour.
The course’s ultimate focus is on the function and status of national and European borders and the question of what it means to belong to a political community: who is in, who is out? How and why are people included or excluded? And, what, finally, is the future of a borderless Europe?
Taught by a skeptical European who lived, studied and worked in Germany, Slovakia, Ireland, Australia and Hong Kong, this course includes a number of interviews with leading scholars, practitioners and best-selling authors, including Timothy Garton Ash (Oxford), Chris Bickerton (Cambridge), Frank Furedi (Brussels), Hans Kundnani (New York), Michael Martens (Vienna), Maria Popova (Montreal), George Papandreou (Athens), Alexander Thiele (Berlin), Helen Thomson (Cambridge), Ben Tonra (Dublin) and David Vaughan (Prague).
The European Union pervades all aspects of people’s lives. But the course will be of particular interest to many professionals dealing with the EU whether they are EU citizens, or not.
