International and Transnational Relations of the EU
The European Union is an international actor of growing significance. Its external policies and those of its member states have major impacts on its neighbours and beyond. In recent years, the Centre has focused on the enlargement of the EU, the Mediterranean region, and transatlantic relations.
The global trade regime, European foreign and security policies, and the EU as an international actor are issues among our interests. The Centre is currently turning its attention to the wider 'neighbourhood' policy.
ReligioWest is a four year research project funded by the European Research council and based at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
It aims at studying how different western states in Europe and North America are redefining their relationship to religions, under the challenge of an increasing religious activism in the public sphere, associated with new religious movements and with Islam.
Although each country starts from very different and specific contexts of the relationship between state, religion and public sphere, this move seems to lead to a more uniform perception of what the relationship should be.
More importantly, it seems to lead to the use of a common paradigm of what religion is, with the consequence of pushing religions, through a complex array of constraints (public order) and incentives (freedom of religion), to format themselves according to this common paradigm.
But, due to the de jure or de facto separation of church and state, governments have little leverage on this process. It is made under a mix of social and political pressure (banning or not the visible signs of Islam for instance) and the promotion of a concept of freedom of religion more linked to the US common law tradition than to the European tradition of dominant or even established religions with close relations (even conflicting) with the state.
The project explores the complex and differentiated process by which the EU extends its unbundled functional and legal borders to the so-called southern Mediterranean (North Africa and parts of the Middle East), thereby transforming it into borderlands. They connect the European core with the periphery through various legal and functional border regimes, governance patterns, and the selective outsourcing of some EU border control duties.
Europe in World Politics and EU Foreign and Security Affairs
This research domain includes Europe’s international relations, and its role in international and security affairs. We seek to integrate theoretical and conceptual grounding from a wide range of perspectives in international relations, the social sciences, and international law with empirical research and political relevance. This thread explicitly ties the study of Europe in international affairs to the central changes and challenges in world politics and international security of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The RSCAS seeks to address some of the main areas pertaining to Europe’s place and role in the world, such as the rocky and still tenuous consolidation of the EU as a ‘high politics’ actor in global affairs; the (uneven) emergence of pan-European foreign, security, and defense policies; issues of European strategy and purpose; internal and external aspects of European security and defense; as well as the foreign, security, or defense policies of individual European states or groups of states.
As one part of this research agenda, Ulrich Krotz investigates the causes and motivations behind the EU’s twenty-five military and civilian missions abroad to date, along with several ‘negative cases’ in which joint action did not materialize. Tentatively titled ‘Divided We Stand’, the book project elucidates the bumpy emergence of common European foreign, security, and defense stances – and thus central aspects of the EU’s growing external involvement in international security affairs over the past fifteen or so years. Drawing from general international relations theory, the book develops hypotheses on differing degrees of cooperation or its absence with respect to the possibility of joint action. The project focuses on explaining variation in cooperative outcomes, as well as cases of failure, since the process began in the mid-1990s.
In another research project, Ulrich Krotz scrutinizes the phenomenon of ‘special’ interstate relations in international politics. This project develops a conceptual framework to investigate diverse kinds of special relationships between states and to study their political impact on international affairs. It distinguishes among different types of special relationships, and analyzes the diverse conditions from which special relations have emerged historically. In the investigation of the character, diversity, and significance of special interstate relationships, this project combines matters of general international relations, European foreign relations and transatlantic affairs, issues of global and regional governance, and comparative methods and research design.
Since 1999 the Mediterranean Programme has been developing various activities focusing on the Euro-Mediterranean area understood as embracing also Middle-Eastern countries, Gulf States, Iran, and Iraq. It was created thanks to the generous support of private and public corporations.
The Mediterranean Programme has been conceived as a comparative and interdisciplinary programme, with a special emphasis on political economy perspective. It therefore articulates specific academic activities (summer schools, seminars, international conferences, workshops, publications) with more policy oriented projects (high profile lectures, partner of the 'Task Force Middle East' on Iraq, conferences on the geopolitics of energy).
The Annual Mediterranean Research Meeting that has taken place every year in March since 2000 is the perfect illustration of the main objectives of the Programme: helping the dialogue between academia and expertise, connecting different generations of scholars and favouring the networking, interaction and cooperation of people from Europe, North Africa and the Middle-East.
In the coming years, the Mediterranean Programme will develop new research lines centred on the EU-Mediterranean partnership and the neighbourhood policy in this region. It will also host a project on Muslim minorities in the Europe Union (EU-MUSMIN).
The Transatlantic Programme conducts policy-oriented and basic research on the subjects of transatlantic relations and transatlantic governance. Its activities aim at improving public and scholarly understanding of transatlantic partnership, and the role of the transatlantic partners in issues of global governance.
Established in September 2000, thanks to a generous grant from BP, the programme receives generous support from the US Mission to the European Union to bring American scholars and policy-makers to the Centre.
The programme's activities include sponsoring research, hosting visiting research fellows, organizing workshops and conferences, and publishing policy-relevant results focusing on political and security relations, trade and regulatory relations and monetary and financial relations.
Studying the social dimensions and dynamics of change in post-2011 North Africa
Looking beyond the day-to-day ups and downs of political transition in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia after 2011, DIRECTIONS is a research initiative which aims at identifying and analysing directions of change in North Africa.
Page last updated on 17 August 2017