On 19 and 20 January 2017 the EUCOPAS-THESEUS PhD Workshop "Being a member of the EU: pros & cons" took place at Sciences Po Paris. It was aimed at enabling PhD candidates in EU studies to exchange ideas and discuss their research with their peers and senior academic colleagues.

 

Topic: The decision of the British people to withdraw from the European Union leads to consider differently the issue of the memberstateness of the EU. What has been taken for granted for ages in most of the European member states now starts to be questioned and reconsidered. Political debates in many countries tend to address the pros and cons of remaining in the EU or of joining it. For others, the issue is not leaving the EU but transforming it into a differentiated set that could take the form of a 'core Europe' or of 'multiple circles'. The conclusions of the European Council meeting of the 18 and 19 February 2016 address this issue by stating: '[...] such processes make possible different paths of integration for different Member States, allowing those that want to deepen integration to move ahead, whilst respecting the rights of those which do not want to take such a course'. The PhD workshop will therefore be an opportunity to address, through case studies and empirical works, the issue of the state of the EU, especially questioning the domestic relation to the EU (narratives, Europeanisation...) as well as the transformative nature of the EU (differentiated integration, core Europe...).

 

PhD Workshop Report

 

We congratulate Marie Walter-Franke, Freie Universität Berlin, for the best paper. Marie received the award for her paper on "Building a common European Asylum System despite discordance? The role of stereotypes in the discursive process of policy-making". She was invited to publish her paper in the academic journal Politique européenne.