SCHUMAN LECTURE 2022

 

Sovereignty, Emancipation & Power:

Three things the EU can’t deal with – and what to do about it

 

MON 9 MAY, 20:00
Franz Palm Lecture Hall, Tongersestraat 53

 

Ulrike Guérot

Professor of European Politics, Institute of Political Science and Sociology and Chair for

European Politics, CERC, University of Bonn

 

The EU is at a moment of its historical development that is far from insignificant. Exhausted by a decade of crisis (banking, euro, austerity, refugee and pandemic), the EU’s narrative of a 70-year

‘peace & prosperity’ legend is cracking under increasing social unrest, the rise of populism

and obvious fractures in the democratic systems of all EU member states.

While a broad and encouraging exercise of discursive democracy is taking place, with the #CoFoE

questioning European citizens about the future of the EU, public support of the EU is declining.

Furthermore, political developments during the pandemic situation have increased the EU’s struggle for geostrategic and geoeconomics autonomy, if not for its very survival. So how can it succeed in a relaunch of Europe, which gets the EU back into power and assures the adherence of citizens to the European project, as the triptych of the French EU Presidency suggests?

 

This year’s Schuman Lecture will argue that to do this, it is necessary to detail and fix the notion of European sovereignty and relink it to an emancipatory momentum of, and for European citizens.

 

Ulrike Guérot is Professor at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology and holds the Chair for

European Politics at the CERC (Centre Ernst Robert Curtius) of the University of Bonn. She is the founder of the European Democracy Lab, Berlin, and was previously head of the Department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy at Danube University Krems, Austria. She has worked in various European think-tanks as well as at universities in Paris, Brussels, London, Washington and Berlin. In 2019, she was awarded the Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honor as well as the Salzburg Award for Research on the Future. In 2020, she published her most recent book Nichts wird so bleiben wie es war? (Molden).