Europe and the European Union: Politicizing Europeanness

Call for Papers for the Panel: Europe and the European Union: Politicizing Europeanness

(As part of 5th Euroacademia International Conference: Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers, Barcelona, 27 ? 28 March 2015)

Deadline for paper proposals: 25th of February 2015
Europe and the European Union: Politicizing Europeanness

Panel Description

Historically, the EU is both curious and controversial: it is hard to explain from a state-centrist view the delegation of sovereignty and the fragile agreement on the gradual extension of the EU powers together with externalizations of the decision making to a polity that can be described, as Jacques Delors expressed it, as an unidentified political object. However, in the last 60 years the European Union absorbed increasing amounts of intellectual and political energies that attempted to singularly or complementary explain the nature of the beast and the logic of the processes unfolded within. A large amount of theoretical assumptions, methodological choices and explanatory techniques were imported from different fields of research to constitute what gradually took the shape of the EU studies. Still today, the European Union is seen as a unique project of regional integration that is unsettled and unfinished and yet a particular scientific vocabulary takes shape and influences research and policy making. The present panel aims to take into account the enormous creative energies invested in understanding and shaping the project of the European Union from the limited competences granted at the creation of the European Economic Community till the current formulation of the post-national understandings of its evolution.

This panel aims to bring openly on the floor of debate both the past and the contemporary trends in the study of the European Union trough the use of the magnifying glasses. The panel seeks to create an opportunity for evaluative accounts of essential developments within the study of the European Union. These accounts are to be understood as creative moments for articulating current concerns in the frame of disciplinary dialogue and methodological constrains or opportunities provided by the established traditions in the field of European studies. It is an opportunity for revisiting and assessing the persistent epistemological challenges in the field, the inheritances and their creative potential, the orthodoxies but also the heresies.

The panel welcomes contributions on the following topics (you by no means limited to):

~ Before the European Union: The Initial Assumptions and the Historical Choices Revisited
~ Neo-Functionalism and the Persistence of Spill-over Effects
~ The EU Studies and IR Conceptual Imports: An Assessment
~ The Regulatory Theory and EU efficiency
~ Is EU an Inter-Governmental Organization Again?
~ Addressing the European Identity: How and How to Measure It?
~ The Lessons of Enlargements
~ The Future of Enlargement
~ EU as a Political System
~ EU as a Normative Power
~ Working Hard to Find a European Demos
~ Cosmopolitanism and the EU as a Post-National Order
~ The Effects of Crises on the EU
~ The Crises of European Solidarity
~ EU and the Choice for Austerity Politics in Exiting the Crisis
~ Greece and the Crisis of the Eurozone
~ The European Elections and the New Right Parties in the European Parliament
~ ECB and Crisis Management
~ Exiting the Eurozone: A Real Choice?
~ EU and Russia: The Conflict in Ukraine

Please apply on-line or submit abstracts of less than 300  words together with the details of affiliation by 25th of February 2015 to [email protected]

For complete details please see the conference website:
http://euroacademia.eu/conference/5th-europe-inside-out/