In the latest episode of the #uniquelyEUI anniversary series, three voices from the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) sit down to reflect on what makes the EUI's youngest unit unlike any other. Professor Johanna Mair, Director of the School, joins Policy Leader Fellow Laura Rahm and Master in Transnational Governance student Francesco Gallo in a wide-ranging conversation about thinking beyond borders, learning as equals, and governing a world that refuses to stay within them.
As the EUI celebrates 50 years, the School marks a milestone of its own: In 2027, it will turn ten. At the heart of the discussion is why it exists, and why its purpose feels more pressing now than when it began.
The Florence STG was set up in 2017, the year of Brexit and the first Trump administration, out of a sense that the institutions and rules long taken for granted were no longer keeping up with the challenges they were meant to solve. Most of those – climate, migration, inequality, security – do not stop at national borders, and the Florence STG was built to take them on as they are. Its mandate is European, but its instinct is to cooperate with other policy schools rather than compete, in the interest of progress for Europe.
This video conversation turns to what the experience looks like in practice. Rather than a pipeline for talent, those around the table describe a circle – a feedback loop that lets the outside in and the inside out. Its clearest expression is the internship between the two years of the master's programme, which sends students into institutions such as the European External Action Service in Brussels and brings them back transformed. Just as telling is the way master students and Policy Leader Fellows work side by side: Fellows back student-led initiatives, students lead their own projects and organise events, and both learn as peers rather than across a hierarchy. That openness reaches outward too, through exchanges across CIVICA, the European alliance of social science universities the EUI is part of.
For all three, transnational governance is less a subject than a practice – one to be enacted, tested and improved, much like democracy itself. Both, they suggest, are like a muscle: something that must be trained if it is to remain fit for purpose.
This video is part of an anniversary series celebrating 50 years of research excellence at the EUI. Each episode highlights what defines the EUI academic units and how their legacies are carried forward today. Follow the series under #uniquelyEUI.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.