conferences

Despite the activities of the EU and national institutions as well as intermediate institutions and actors, research as well as opinion surveys diagnose a growing gap between what has been termed “EU elites” and EU citizens. The EU has a legitimacy problem, support rates have been decreasing during the peak of the financial crisis and despite the economic situation improving, votes for populist, extremist, anti-EU and anti-democrat parties and movements are on the rise throughout the EU. At the same time, the Europeanisation of politics and decision making continues to impact and transform the national democratic systems of the member states.

What explains the distance between EU institutions and EU citizens? The event will present the first results of the Jean Monnet research projects "Debating Europe" and the Jean Monnet Chair "BridgE" on this question. A total of 18 international focus groups have been and are being conducted in Bulgaria, Finland, France, Croatia, Slovenia, and Germany as part of the projects. Twelve of them have already taken place, and the results are available.

There are three public panels:

The interim results of the Jean Monnet Network “Debating Europe” will be presented on September 11 at 6:00 pm by Claudia Wiesner (Fulda University of Applied Sciences), Cecile Robert (Sciences Po Lyon) Willy Beauvallet (Université de Lyon II), Ana Matan; (University of Zagreb), Meta Novak (University of Ljubljana), Niilo Kauppi and Kim Zilliacus (University of Helsinki) and Ruzha Smilova (Centre for Liberal Strategies).

Research and opinion surveys diagnose a growing gap between
what "EU elites" is called and EU citizens. The EU has a legitimacy problem, support rates have been decreasing during the financial crisis, despite the economic situation improving, votes for populist, extremist, anti-EU and anti-democrat parties and movements are on the rise, the Europeanisation of politics and decision making continues o impact and transform the national democratic systems.

The Jean Monnet Network "Debating Europe" (DebatEU) uses
debate as a methodology for

• spreading knowledge on the European Union (EU) to target groups previously not well informed
• gaining knowledge about citizens' opinions
• integrating teaching and research activities
• enhancing exchange between citizens, students, academics and EU practitioners via conferences, events, a website, social media and various publications

Despite the activities of the EU and national institutions as well as intermediate institutions and actors, research as well as opinion surveys diagnose a growing gap between what has been termed “EU elites” and EU citizens. The EU has a legitimacy problem, support rates have been decreasing during the peak of the financial crisis (see also the respective Eurobarometer data) and despite the economic situation improving, votes for populist, extremist, anti-EU and anti-democrat parties and movements are on the rise throughout the EU. At the same time, the Europeanisation of politics and decision making continues to impact and transform the national democratic systems of the member states.

Our network takes stock of this situation. The primary aim is to open debate and get into a dialogue on the EU with citizens that are neither engaged in EU-oriented civil-society organisations, nor in political parties, in order to bridge the gap between the EU and its citizens. The core of the network consists in citizen focus group discussions that the network members will organise in their home countries – three focus group discussions per country and 18 altogether in three years, with minimum ten citizen participants. The country selection is particularly adequate for our task.

The European Union is regarded to be in a severe crisis at least since 2008, when the financial crisis began to hit. This labelling brings about several questions. The first ones concern the concept of crisis as such – crisis is a concept that is often criticised for both being used in inflationary manner and be a catch-all concept. The sole example of the EU underlines this: since the early days of integration, “crisis talk” regularly came up. If we are willing to speak about crises, we can also argue that in recent years the EU has struggled to a series of multiple and near-endless challenges that each have been termed “crises” – regarding the Eurozone, the question of migration, the Brexit vote as well as the Brexit procedure, and most recently the COVID-pandemic. These critical issues were accompanied by and/or have contributed to a questioning of the EU’s legitimacy, its governance structures, and the integration project itself, in order for academia to speak of a crisis of the EU altogether or even a “polycrisis”. These critical issues and the bespoke crises have generated their own literatures.

Dec 3rd, Day 1:

9.15 – 9:30 - Welcome

9.30 - Beginning of the Conference

9:30– 11.00 - Panel 1

The EU’s crisis and its understanding

• What crisis? The multiple facets of crisis/es in the current EU (Claudia Wiesner, University of Applied Sciences Fulda)
• Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of moral critique and political crisis (Matthias Klemm, University of Fulda)
• The concept of crisis and its operationalization in Portugal before and after the crisis (Luis Freitas, University of Jyväskyla)

11.00 – 11.30 - Coffee Break

11.30 – 13.00 - Panel 2

Conceptions of Europe and its crisis

• Transformations of the idea of supranationalism in the global order after 1989 (Taru Haapala, Autonomous University Madrid)
• Is Europe's perspective a multiform republican empire?(Michael Wolf, Berlin Institute for Applied Social Sciences, BIAS eV, Berlin)
• Governing meaning, governing migration: (Dis-)integrative struggles and the current EU crisis (Julia Simon, MA, Helmut Schmidt University/University of Federal Armed Forces)

13.00 – 14.30 - Lunch Break

14.30 –16.00 - Panel 3

Democracy and crisis

• A triple democratic trauma and its consequences (Ana Matan and Tonci Kursar, University of Zagreb)
• The Crisis of Parliamentarism repeated (Kari Palonen, University of Jyväskylä)
• Crisis of democracy as a crisis of representation: a view from normative political theory (Elena García Guitan, Autonomous University Madrid)

16.00 - End of day 1