The course is designed for students of political science with a special interest in the European Union. As an advanced course, it is meant for master level students wishing to widen their understanding about the EU as a polity, about EU’s policies and its politics.
The first part of the course (EU polity) will focus on selected forms of EU conceptualisations, such as ‘con- vs. federal’, ’consociational’, ‘cosmopolitan’, or ‘neo-medieval’. The second part (EU policies) will turn its focus onto a number of policy fields, among others single market and foreign policy or diplomacy. In the third part of the course (EU politics) we are going to take up and examine some examples of EU internal and external politics, for instance the politics of Treaty reform, the role of supranational actors in the IGCs or the EU politics in its neighbourhood.
The main objective of the course is to use these three perspectives in order to shed some broader light on EU polity structures, policy fields and political dimensions and with them to widen student’s perspective of what is at stake in the process of European integration.