EU Politics

WE WELCOME ALL PANEL AND PAPER PROPOSALS ON EU POLITICS. BELOW ARE SOME SPECIFIC IDEAS FROM THE SECTION CHAIRS. The section Giada and Gabriele would like to propose aims to bring together scholars focusing on European Policy, foreign policy practices in the European system and peacebuilding within the context of International Relations, European Studies and Political Science. While European foreign policy continues to attract the attention of many, EU integration, interest group representation and interinstitutional relations have been undergoing a revival. Moreover, the EU Security Strategy, first outlined in 2003, has called on the European Union to engage in a long series of activities on the international chessboard, such as conflict prevention, counter-terrorism activities, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, etc. (Council of the EU 2003:12). This section seeks to bring these elements together in order to provide a fuller picture of European diplomatic practices, to identify the link between the EU’s internal nature and its external projection, while benefiting from the current theoretical interest in policy practices. The overarching economic and political crisis in Europe has impacted on the EU’s role in international politics and possibly exacerbated the tensions between innovative and ingrained ways of performing in conflict resolution. One of the goals of the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, was to lay the foundations of its foreign policy. In the Article J.1 it was specified that the EU proposed a number of goals, including the defense of common values, the fundamental interests and independence of the Union, strengthening the security of the Union and its Member States, the promotion of international security, democracy and the rule of law. The Maastricht Treaty was the main document for the implementation of communitarian policies until 2009, when it entered into force on the Lisbon Treaty. This document covers many areas of EU policies. It led to the creation European External Action Service (EEAS), with the task of managing and directing EU foreign policy. This session aims to analyze how the practices implemented by the EU can achieve the targets, by analyzing the effects. We will ask if the policies implemented by the EU are effective in the light of the latest research in the field of European studies, by addressing the various issues from an empirical, theoretical and historical point of view. Biography of Giada Laganà Giada Lagana is a PhD candidate at the School of political science and sociology, National University of Ireland Galway, where she arrived in October 2013. She is awarded of the Galway Doctoral Research Scholarship. Her thesis looks at the European Union impact and at the Europeanization of the Northern Ireland peace process between 1993 and 2013, under the supervision of Doctor Niall O’Dochartaigh, founder and convener of the Standing Group on Political Violence of the European Consortium for Political Research. Giada started out as an historian, completing her undergraduate studies in modern and contemporary history at the University of Pavia. She then started a MA in International Relations and History, under the joint supervision of Didier Poton and Michel Catala (Université de Nantes). Her final dissertation, submitted in June 2013, looked at the L’Osservatore Romano press coverage of the Northern Ireland Troubles. She obtained the grade of 17/20 (first class honours). Giada’s primary current research interest is how the European Union affirmed itself at the international level as a conflict resolution body - which brought it to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012: how it shaped its foreign and security policy; the understanding of the intergovernmental bargaining that brought from regional to cohesion policy and the governance of the budgetary policies and their distribution to Member States, with Northern Ireland as a case-study. She served on approximately 10 conferences and she was a panel chair in the American Conference for Irish Studies, held in Miami last April. She presently is a tutor in the School of political science and Sociology at the NUIG, where she teaches first year’s seminars and she spent six weeks in January/February 2015 teaching European History and Politics at the ESSCA business school in Angers (France). Biography of Gabriele Ciampini Gabriele Ciampini is PhD Candidate in political science at the University of Florence and University of Paris-Sorbonne (co-tutelle internationale de thèse). He completed his undergraduate studies in political theory at the University of Pisa and obtained a Master of Arts in Political theory spending one semester at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. During this period, he attended at the seminar “L’Union Européenne et ses Institutions”, focused on the political and legal foundations of the European Union. His PhD research project, focused on the history of political thought, looks at the reconstruction of the political thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel, one of the most important French liberal political theorists in the 20th Century. His thesis represents the occasion to develop themes focused on the theory of political power applied to the European integration. His interest in political theory applied to the EU, led him to serve on several conference presentations, between whom: the “Shanghai International Conference on Social Science”, in August 2012, where he presented the paper “European Federalism and International Security in the Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel”. Gabriele Ciampini also contributed in the organization of a joint conference between the University of Pisa and the Paris-Sorbonne University on the history of neoliberalism. He was a panel chair in the last ECPR General Conference ( "Liberalism and Economics" - panel number: 214).