Deadline extended - 14 Oct - Call for papers: The European Union re-founded?
Rethinking EU governance in times of permanent crisis
Annual Danish European Association- European Community Studies Association Conference 2021
Venue: Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
Date: 2nd-3rd December 2021
Keynote Speaker: Professor Jonas Tallberg, Stockholm University
During the last decades, the European Union has witnessed significant crises and challenges that are testing its resilience. The financial crisis, the recurrent undermining of the rule of law, Brexit, the asylum crisis, and recently Covid-19 have settled the European Union in a status of permanent crisis. This crisis challenged the ability of EU institutions and Member States to adapt their policies to pressing legal and societal needs. Additionally, the EU has reacted to future challenges like climate change and digital economy by setting a new digital and green transition that repositions the European Union as a global actor.
The initiatives and reforms proposed to tackle crisis and challenges have entailed a series of renewed political commitments to the EU project that favour supranational tendencies. Apparently, the state of permanent crisis brings not just challenges but also opportunities for the future of the Union. Despite the sovereignty concerns and criticisms that conditioned the new policy solutions, the EU has been able to propose crucial policy responses and innovations that reconstructed the European integration process. Moreover, as in the case of the economic policies approved for tackling the financial crisis of the Covid-19, we have observed how these policy responses are based on institutions, framings, and policies constituted in previous crises, showing the importance of inter-crisis learning for the survival and reconstitution of the European project.
Understanding how this series of crises affected different policy areas and how the interactions and engagement of EU actors and Member States became crucial for assessing what type of EU will emerge in the future characterised by tendencies of deeper integration, disintegration, or differentiation. For that purpose, a scholarly and policy debate that confronts different theories of political, economic, legal, and social integration is urgently needed to describe how multiple crises affected and will affect integration. This inquiry will put EU institutions and policies into historical perspective to give an answer to some of these following questions: Which leading dynamics and actors might be identified in these crisis period? How these crises period dominated by high politics impacted the normal functioning of the EU policy-making process and the balance between EU actors and among them and the Members States? What are the dominant institutional legacies determining the policy solutions and innovations brought in different crises? What is the margin for policy and institutional innovation when framings and institutions are pre-determined by previous crises?
These are some of the core questions that will be addressed at the forthcoming Danish European Community Studies Annual Conference, University of Copenhagen, 2-3 December 2021. The conference welcomes panels addressing these crucial questions from different disciplinary angles (e.g. law, political science, history, sociology, economics, among others). In this regard, the conference aims at promoting interdisciplinary exchanges necessary today to understand the complexity of many of the multifaceted challenges that the EU is facing as a supranational and as a global actor.
Deadline for abstracts and panels: 14 October 2021.
You can send your abstract and panel proposals to Shai Dothan: shai.dothan@jur.ku.dk & Juan A. Mayoral: juan.mayoral@jur.ku.dk. You can also contact them before the deadline to discuss any potential panel proposals.
In the panel proposal, you must indicate the names, emails and institutional affiliations of the presenters, the chair, and the discussant (if applicable). Maximum 4 papers/presenters per panel. You can submit the proposal in word or pdf. Other information to include in the abstract:
- The title of the panel
- The abstract of the panel (no more than 500 words)
- 3–5 keywords
- The title of each paper
- The abstract of each paper (no more than 500 words)
- 3–5 keywords for each paper.