Early Career Workshop: Political Theory of European Integration, 4 & 5 June 2015

ACCESS EUROPE in collaboration with the Amsterdam Centre for Political Thought

There is little doubt that European integration offers a wonderful laboratory for contemporary political theory as it challenges established norms within the confines of the European nation-states and, at the same time, opens up new transnational and supranational domains that need to be understood and evaluated on their own distinctive terms. In light of that promise, political theorists have actually been quite slow to engage with European integration. Of course, there is the continuing debate on the EU’s democratic deficit, but notably it is more often used as a background for empirical political science than that it is thoroughly probed in theoretical terms. Legal scholarship on European integration has yielded a more coherent body of normative thinking, as is for instance also reflected by the contributions to the edited volume by Wiener and Neyer (OUP 2010). At the same time, the debate on global justice flourishes in political philosophy, but there have been very few attempts to project that debate on the European context. In short, despite notably individual interventions, there is so far little of a coherent body of political theorizing on European Integration and the Union.

This workshop aims to contribute to a more systematic debate among theorists of European integration by assembling a selected number of scholars in the early stages of their career who have made their first notable interventions in the debate. They span the disciplines of legal and political theory and come from different national backgrounds. The workshop is to serve as a platform for making acquaintances, to present on-going work (not necessarily fully-finished papers), and (depending on the work presented) to serve as a platform for one or two collective publications (preferably special issues).

Time and place

From Thursday 4 June 2015 (9:00) to Friday 5 June (16:30)

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: Metropolitan Building, Buitenveldertselaan 3-7, Room Z-009.

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Programme 

Each presenter will have 15 minutes to introduce his or her paper. The discussant will offer their perspective on each paper in the subsequent 15 minutes.  After short responses by the discussants, the discussion is opened up to the floor for the remaining time.