By Ian Mundell
A look at the successes of the Jean Monnet programme, and where it can improve and develop.
Academics always want more funding, and those involved in the EU's Jean Monnet programme for studies on European integration were no different when they gathered in Brussels in September for their annual meeting. But with a tough debate ahead on EU budgets, European Commission education director-general Odile Quintin warned them that this was not going to be easy.
“Those who lived through the problems of the ‘one per cent' countries have ended up thinking that one per cent is very generous compared to what we risk having in a difficult economic period,” she said, referring to a ceiling proposed in the past round of negotiations. She invited the assembled academics to prove their worth by helping the Commission in its reflections as it prepared the next financial perspectives.
The Jean Monnet programme was created in 1990 to support the study and teaching of European integration through university chairs, centres of excellence, course modules, and information and research activities. Now present in 61 countries around the world, the programme supports a network of 1,500 professors, reaching an estimated 250,000 students every year. In the current EU financial plan, the programme has roughly €4.4 million to spend on this work over five years.
Academics value the programme for giving their subject increased status within universities, and for giving them time to concentrate on their research and a rich network of international connections. Most importantly, support from the Jean Monnet programme allows them to be independent. They are expected to be critical, and can even be Eurosceptic if they wish.
Enlargement success
The programme has had its greatest impact in the enlargement of the EU. Academics in accession countries received support from the programme, providing expert advice to their governments when negotiations began, training civil servants, and even going into politics themselves. The Jean Monnet academics also played a part in debate over EU constitutional reform, although in some cases this opened them up to accusations of being on the side of the Commission.
But fresh challenges need to be found if the case is to be made for continued or increased funding.
Quintin reassured academics that they still have a role. “You will continue to be a strong player in the EU's dialogue with its eastern European neighbours,” she said. “Building on this I see scope for a renewed role for the programme within the neighbourhood policy and the recently launched Eastern Partnership.”
She added that the programme had “a major role to play in making the European Union's role as an international player better understood, by bringing knowledge about the European model and about other models around the world.”
This will require an extension of the programme to countries not yet involved, she went on, and stronger co-operation between Jean Monnet centres and others worldwide.
This use of the Jean Monnet programme to compare the EU with other regional integration processes was a theme at the conference. Carlos Molina del Pozo, who holds a Jean Monnet chair at the Universidad de Alcalá in Spain, argued that there is great potential for thematic groups to be organised in this area. “Latin America is the most European place outside Europe, and we are ignoring these countries, even though they think we are important,” he said. If Europe does not engage with these countries they will increasingly look to their neighbours in the north, he warned.
Flexibility
Comparative integration studies would also raise Europe's profile in places such as South Korea, where the EU itself is of little academic interest. “There are people in Europe who emphasise that European integration is the product of a very specific historical situation, and I agree with that, but that's not enough to promote more European studies in Asia,” said Woosik Moon, who holds a Jean Monnet chair at Seoul National University. “There is a strong need to generalise integration studies.”
However, extending the Jean Monnet network overseas might also mean some changes. Academics in Japan find it difficult to meet the requirement for 120 hours of teaching per academic year on European integration in order to secure a Jean Monnet chair, while in Africa administrative demands exclude many universities. “A different approach is necessary, tailor-made to different circumstances in Africa,” said Gerrit Olivier, director of the Centre for European Studies at the University of Johannesburg.
Another suggestion was that the programme could broaden its outlook to cover specific policy issues. This is something that Amy Verdun has been doing at the University of Victoria in Canada, where she directs the Jean Monnet centre of excellence.
“We are not looking at the EU just with economics, law and political science, but also at what really matters to Canadians,” she said, citing healthcare and integration of migrants into society as topics where a dialogue with Europe could be fruitful. “But that requires that the funder is more interested in those kinds of things and more flexible.”
Similar changes in focus would also be useful within Europe, according to Catherine Flaesch-Mougin, director of the Jean Monnet centre of excellence at the University of Rennes 2. She suggested that more chairs should be created in the areas of freedom, security and justice, and that there could be more support for modules teaching European integration in courses devoted to science and engineering.
Young academics could also be better provided for in the Jean Monnet programme. “In France it is difficult for young lecturers to satisfy the programme's demand for a minimum amount of teaching,” she said, “so perhaps we could create Jean Monnet junior chairs with less stringent teaching demands but stronger involvement in research.”
And to match Quintin's call for academics to prove their worth, there were several demands for the EU institutions to make greater use of the expertise they have created with the programme. “Here we are in the prime of life and they are not listening to us,” lamented Molina del Pozo.
Luxembourg moves centre stage
By Ian Mundell
Being so close and so well-connected to the EU institutions, the University of Luxembourg is well-placed for prominence in European studies.
With its high-profile EU institutions and a young university, Luxembourg is gaining prominence as a place to study European issues. A series of significant academic partnerships announced this year point to further growth in the years to come.
Since its creation on 2003, the University of Luxembourg has made a virtue of its proximity to EU institutions such as the European Court of Justice, the European Investment Bank and the European Court of Auditors.
We want to open it up completely, so that people can have an intelligent, open and broad training
“We have formal links in some programmes,” says Michel Margue, dean of the faculty of language and literature, humanities, arts and education.
He points to the master's in contemporary European history, “where members of the EU institutions in the broadest sense regularly participate”.
European Investment Bank's library
Margue also talks of links at the research level. “One of the most important developments has been the transfer of a large part of the European Investment Bank's library to the university, which opens up a whole research area concerning the socio-economic evolution of Europe,” he says. Initially 10,000 of the 100,000 volumes in the bank's library have been moved to the university, with more to follow when the new campus at Esch-Beval is ready.
“These are books and reports published by external bodies and acquired by the bank since its foundation in 1958,” says Rémy Jacob, director-general of the bank's strategy and corporate centre. “The collection includes a large number of documents which are either out of print or otherwise hard to come by today. We are working in close collaboration with historians at the university, to ensure that the final collection is a coherent set of works of significant historical interest.”
Beyond the convenience of having its library nearby, the bank sees the project as a way of giving the university a helping hand, and making the material available to the wider academic community. For academics and students, it will be a significant resource alongside the archives of the European Parliament, which are also held in the city.
Legal studies
For legal studies, being almost next door to the Court of Justice is a clear benefit. “Its presence is a very important asset for us and we have built upon that relationship for some time,” says André Prüm, dean of the faculty of law, economics and finance. “In our master's programme on European litigation, a good part of the lectures are given by judges and advocates general. All our students so far have been lucky enough to have internships at the [European] Court of Justice, and we currently have more than ten students who are working as référendaires.”
The court was also a decisive factor for the Max Planck Society, a German research organisation, when it was invited by the Luxembourg government to establish a research institute in the Grand Duchy. “This is one of the reasons that we went for an institute of procedural law,” says Wolfgang Schön, the vice-president responsible for the society's human sciences section. “This outstanding and international group of judicial personalities is something very hard to find elsewhere.”
When it reaches full strength, the institute will have 50-60 positions, grouped in three departments. The first will deal with civil procedure, including European rules on cross-border trade and commerce, and the procedural questions that arise from it. The second will focus on the regulation of financial markets, and the third on international courts – also including the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Directors for the three departments are now being recruited, with the aim of establishing the institute in 2010, close to the university. “There will be a doctoral programme, and collaboration with the university will be an important factor,” says Schön.
High-performance centre
Prüm hopes that the institute will become one of a cluster of high-performing centres collaborating with the university. Others include a research foundation to be established in Luxembourg by the European Corporate Governance Institute (which is itself also expected to move south from its current seat in Brussels) and a research centre which is being discussed with Unidroit, the Rome-based International Institute for the Unification of Private Law.
Both university faculties involved in European studies expect to broaden their offer of master's education in the years to come. In law, the master's in European law will be expanded beyond its current specialisations in litigation, banking and finance law, and criminal law relating to economics and finance. Plans include a master's in European fiscal law, with a professor already recruited to a chair endowed by tax advisors Atoz, and further specialisation in private law.
“One of our ambitions is to create a European academy for contract law,” Prüm says, “and we could position ourselves in a similar way with respect to European law on telecommunications and media.”
In Margue's faculty there are plans to launch a master's in political science, with a focus on European governance that builds on its thriving research programme (see right). He also wants to build on the university's first Jean Monnet chair, awarded this year to historian René Leboutte, with the ultimate aim of securing funds for a centre under this EU scheme for European integration studies.
Youth studies
A further goal is to develop a European side to the faculty's work on the science of education and social pedagogy. Discussions are under way with potential partner universities develop a master's in youth studies.
A general master's programme in European studies could be constructed from assets developed in the specialised courses. “We started with specific master's programmes and these are becoming ever more specialised,” says Margue. “Now it is perhaps interesting to envisage a more general or flexible programme, simply with the modules that are already in place, and which could then lead to a specialist orientation.”
This already offers opportunities for people who want to avoid excessive specialisation. “In our programme,” Prüm adds, “it is anticipated that a jurist could also follow a course in philosophy or in history. We want to open it up completely, so that people can have an intelligent, open and broad training.”
European governance research programme
By Ian Mundell
Looking for niche areas for development
Philippe Poirier was working for the European Parliament's constitutional affairs committee in Luxembourg when he was approached by the government to participate in setting up a department in the city's new university. At the time he had a post-doctoral position to go to at the University of British Columbia, but this new offer was too good to miss. “To create a centre inside a new university is the sort of opportunity you get once in your career, or never,” he says.
In developing the European governance research programme, Poirier looked for niche areas where the university could take advantage of local resources and address subjects not well-covered by other European studies centres. In particular, the programme has tried to foster a more critical approach. “Together with the rector and my colleagues, I am convinced that a lot of European studies centres are too close to the EU institutions,” he says. “There is not enough distance.”
Growing team
Since it was set up in 2004 with a small team of academics on temporary contracts, the programme has expanded and now consists of six permanent positions, ten research assistants on fixed-term contracts and 30 PhD students. It has also attracted almost €3 million in research grants.
The programme has four main strands: economic and social cohesion; democracy and decision-making processes in the EU (Poirier's own speciality); comparative governance, looking at the EU in the world; and analysis of public policies.
As well as a more critical approach, Poirier has also tried to give the research a broader scope. “Many EU studies centres just concentrate on EU politics and not on the competition between member states,” he says. “European governance is not just about European Union politics.” In the future he wants the programme to carry out more comparative research within the EU, for example looking at the policies of small states and how they influence (or fail to influence) EU decision-making, or comparing state positions on specific policy points.
Future goals
Other future goals include turning more of the fixed-term contracts into permanent posts, building collaborative links with centres in other universities, and adding a fifth research strand on philosophy and governance.
Teaching will also develop, with European governance in economic, social and environmental policies expected to be a special focus of the political science master's programme that the university plans to establish in 2010. “That's something really new,” says Poirier. “If you look at master's in Brussels, Mannheim, Paris or London, you don't have these kinds of programmes. That's part of the strategy: to attract some people who will become specialists in these policy areas.”
Getting some perspective on Europe
The benefits of participating in the prestigious Fulbright programme.
Fulbright is one of the most prestigious names in academic exchange, a programme that every year brings hundreds of American students and academics to Europe and sends a similar number of Europeans in the opposite direction.
While the bulk of the programme is organised at a national level, there is a small pan-European section, the Fulbright-Schuman programme, reserved for those studying EU affairs or EU-US relations.
After a hiatus in 2007-08 when no European awards were made, the scheme opened again in 2008-09, sending eight academics across the Atlantic to work at US institutions for between three months and a year.
In Europe we get the idea that US universities are so much better and bigger, but compared to Sciences-Po or the London School of Economics, it is not so different
The Europeans are free to pursue their research without specific obligations to the host institution, although the idea is that they will also participate in the academic and cultural life of the institution that they visit, in seminars and workshops. “You contribute something to the academic and community environment where you are,” says Daniel Faas, “and you take so much away, which you can either tell people about back home or integrate into your work.”
Faas had a hectic but fruitful stay at the University of California, Berkeley, his planned visit of nine months reduced to four so that he could take up a new post at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). While there he continued his research on the sociology of education and migration, in particular putting the finishing touches to a book, “Negotiating political identities: multiethnic schools and youth in Europe”.
“I could really use that concentrated period of research to connect with quite a number of US scholars, and inform the discussion and debates in the book,” he says. “I included a substantial new section in the final chapter on the second generation in Europe and the United States, and I was able to work out some transatlantic commonalities and differences in the debate around immigrant incorporation.”
The connections that he made in California this spring are still developing. He will return next year to give a series of lectures and launch his book, and he has set up an international undergraduate exchange in sociology between all the campuses of the University of California and TCD.
Most Fulbright-Schuman scholars feel that the programme's pan-European focus is appropriate to their areas of study, but there are also pragmatic reasons for choosing it. When Faas applied, he was attached to a private research institute in Athens and was therefore not eligible for the Fulbright scheme in Germany (you apply according to your nationality, rather than where you are working).
Prestige and generosity
For others, the prestige and the generosity of the award were important. “I had started my research on the basis of a French national research programme, but the Fulbright option is incomparable in terms of connections, and the Fulbright name opens many doors,” says Thierry Leterre, then at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, but now dean of the John E. Dolibois European Center in Luxembourg, an outpost of Miami University, Ohio.
Like other recipients, he was also attracted by the level and nature of the support. “A regular visiting professorship would have equally supported a lengthy stay, but it would have involved teaching duties. What I appreciated in Fulbright was that I had the option of focusing on research.”
Leterre spent four months at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, researching post-9/11 visa policies and drawing parallels with Europe. “I wanted to have access to more data, and a longer stay to make new connections related to my work,” he says. Formal contacts through interviews were one aspect of this, but informal contacts were even more valuable. “You bump into a high-level official at a party and you start chatting and you learn a lot. Not that anybody betrays any secrets, but you get more of an insider view, which is always precious.”
Territory, citizenship and space
Teresa Pullano, from Sciences-Po in Paris, is spending a year in the department of political science at Columbia University, New York, developing themes from her doctorate on free movement within the EU and how this affects ideas of citizenship. “There were major areas of that work that I could not cover in my PhD,” she says. In particular, she is interested in comparing theories of federation in the EU and US, which also take in ideas of territory, citizenship and space. “I'm trying to take insights from the history of the US and contemporary work on this subject,“ she says.
She chose Columbia for its library and because she knew the work of the professors there, but she has not been overawed by the institution.
“In Europe we get the idea that US universities are so much better and bigger, but compared to Sciences-Po or the London School of Economics, it is not so different,” she says. “What makes a difference is the city of New York, since I'm working on questions of the city.”
Leterre was similarly struck by doing fieldwork in Washington, DC, rather than any differences in academic culture at Georgetown. The openness of people at the Department of Homeland Security was a particularly pleasant surprise. “They know where they stand and are happy to share their vision and conceptions,” he recalls. “Security is taken very seriously in the US, which means that people are able to tell you why and how they take it so seriously.”
Faas found differences in academic approach more noticeable in his field. Migration and immigrant integration studies in the US tend to focus on assimilation, while in Europe discussion is about diversity and intercultural aspects of dialogue and education.
“It's interesting to see where the commonalities and differences are, because on both sides of the Atlantic we are trying to address quite similar challenges, such as how to integrate the second generation and how to bond various social and ethnic communities together.”
All three academics would recommend the experience to colleagues. “I've taken away so many contacts, personal friendships but also academic contacts and networks,” says Faas. “It's really worth going, even for the minimum three months that the programme requires, but obviously the longer the better."
Visiting scholars
The Fulbright-Schuman scheme also brings scholars from the US to work in Europe, along with a group of graduate students, an option not extended to Europeans. In the 2008-09 round, four research scholars and six graduate students made the crossing to work here for up to six months.
Carolyn Ban, professor of public affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, came to research the European Commission from the vantage point of the management institute of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In particular, she was interested in the motivation of Commission staff, as well as continuing her research on the impact of EU enlargement and of administrative reform on the institution as a whole.
Mai'a Davis Cross, assistant professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, came to the College of Europe in Bruges to scrutinise EU homeland security policy. Her research is particularly focused on how transnational networks of experts – diplomats, military-defence strategists, technology experts and intelligence officers – promote integration in the EU. It is not just professional academics who benefit. Megan Walline, an attorney in the US Department of the Interior, benefited from Fulbright-Schuman support to look into water management at the Stockholm International Water Institute. Her interest was integrated land, coast and sea governance in general, with a specific focus on law related to the Baltic Sea.
Of the graduate students, some study subjects such as EU transport policy or access to healthcare in university settings, while others visit political actors and institutions rather than academic centres. Jennifer Hadden, a PhD candidate at Cornell University, spent time with the Climate Action Network in Brussels looking at climate change policy, while Stephanie Kent, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, was at the European Parliament carrying out research on interpretation and identity. Vanja Petricevic, a PhD candidate at Georgia State University, researched ethnic minorities in the EU at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels
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