POLITICS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

For more than fifty years, the European Union has led the world’s most advanced experiment in governance beyond the nation-state.  More recently, this experiment has become subject to severe financial turbulence and growing social protest. This course takes a broad view of the promise as well as the challenges of European integration.  It looks at the EU’s basic institutional components, the events leading to the single currency in the 1990s, enlargement eastward into the post-socialist world, and Europe’s changing identity in world affairs. These topics allow us to assess Europe’s ability to craft adequate responses to the challenges posed by economic transformation, terrorism, multiculturalism, and worldwide financial interdependence.