European Studies

This course is divided into two parts. In the first part, it focuses on some key policies of the EU: students look at the economic and monetary policies, justice, and home affairs, the common agricultural policy, environmental and climate policy, trade policy and EU foreign policy.  The second part looks at some current challenges and controversies that the EU is facing. Students consider whether the EU is an efficient and legitimate system, current challenges to the rule of law, Euroscepticism and the increasing domestic contestation. 

This course analyzes the functions of European Union (EU) economic integration with a special focus on the Eurozone. It emphasizes the ways in which the European Single Market for goods, services, and capital impinges on the ability of national governments and European institutions to conduct economic policies. The implications of a monetary union for the functioning of member states' economies and domestic policies are analyzed with the help of macroeconomic tools. The various aspects of economic governance of the European monetary union are studied within the framework of a modern political economy. Structural aspects of the European integration (external economic relations and the role of the EU in globalization, banking and financial regulation, the economic implications of population aging, the transition to a low-carbon economic growth path, etc.) are also dealt with by mobilizing the most recent analyses. The course selects a number of issues that appear salient in current debates about the EU, its relationship with the rest of the world, and its future. It mobilizes the economist's analytical tool box to shed light on policy decision-making and pending issues.

This course examines the emergence of mainly youth-led resistance and protest movements in post-World War II Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and attempts to understand their origins, their meaning and their effect on the societies in which they occurred. American counterculture in the 1960s is often associated with rock’n’roll music, drug-taking, dropping out, and the Anti-Vietnam protest movement. In Europe the associations are more complex and include revitalization of European feminist movements as well as countercultures in places like West Germany and Italy that are remembered for planting bombs and joining underground terror cells in the name of the New Left, or more extreme iterations of the New Left. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, in places like Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, anti-government protesters faced a very different, more dangerous existential struggle against authoritarian regimes that utilized torture and detention without trial to mute or prevent social uprisings. This course accounts for the nature and intensity of post-war European protest movements by examining the historical context of the traumatic impact of recently defeated fascism on the continent, and the division of Europe into spheres of interest reflecting the Cold War world. It examines the post-war socio-economic developments that led to the massive expansion of higher education in Western Europe, promoting a generational divide which saw a radicalized younger generation turn on their parents and other members of the older (Nazi) generation or the so called system, sometimes in rage and violence, as in the examples of the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. This is compared to examples in Eastern Europe, where resistance movements against Communist regimes, such as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, were met with deadly force and violent oppression. The course keeps as its particular focus East Germany (GDR) and West Germany (FRG), but the course also encounters the student-led uprisings against Sovietized Communism in Hungary in 1956 and during the 1968 Prague Spring, as well as the curious case of the Soviet Hippies. Throughout the course, the city of Berlin serves as a backdrop: as a place of often very radical anti-government movements in West Berlin, compared with the muted and hidden resistance to authority over the Berlin Wall in East Berlin. The course also examines how resistance in Western Europe often meant solidarity with anti-colonial movements in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. It also discusses the rise of new political movements as the Green Party.

Regarding transnational migration, the EU promotes a political reasoning between processes of consolidation and necessary conflict, between sovereignty and shared responsibility, between the right to define and delimit and the duty to negotiate. As the visibility of migration increases in various ways, migrants are often represented and imagined as a homogenous mass of “the other." This leads to a problematic understanding of migration as something to be controlled and governed from a top-down perspective alone. But the respective processes of negotiation on migration policy, within and across the outer borders of the Union, take place not only between the official institutions of nation-states, but on all scales of European populations. They also take place from a bottom-up perspective in the centers and at the margins of societies alike. This course departs from concepts of the anthropology of the state and of migration and students first gain an overview of EU-level migration polity. Diving deeper down we will start to change perspective: How do local activists develop and implement their own ways of welcoming migrants? Where do migrants work and how are they represented in trade unions? Finally, focusing on the history of migrant struggles in Berlin, the course encounters migrants’ viewpoints, which reach beyond the usual framings of ‘the poor migrant’ as ‘passive victim,' as a threat or as the ‘(anti-)hero’ of globalization. The course encounters viewpoints on the conflicts, compromises, resistances, solidarity, and social transformation shaping and shaped by recent migration movement to Europe.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course discusses the conceptual grounds of the Universal claim in Roman culture, which are connected to political-military elements as well as to cultural and juridical patterns. The course examines elements of continuity and change in representations and auto-representations of the roman universal cosmic order within historiographical debate and will be able to critically assess the relevance of the theme in the actual organizational and political patterns. Students learn to apply a comparative approach to ancient sources and connect the roman idea of a Universal empire with other contemporary Universal empires, like e.g. Alexander the Great's empire or the Chinese Han dynasty’s Empire, as well as a diachronic approach, by considering how the notion of universal imperial rule has shaped the idea of international order after the end of Antiquity, from the Middle Ages to the present days. The course explores the reception of the historical experience of ancient Rome as a universal model, examining some aspects in which the influence of this historical experience was particularly significant.

This course focuses on protest and activism in contemporary Eastern Europe. It focuses primarily on the post-Soviet region, particularly Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. However, through guest lectures, it also explores protest in Poland and the former Yugoslavia. The course examines various types of protest movements and political activism, including environmental movements and grass-root initiatives, protest events and large scale protest movements, activism and political activities of political emigrants, and other contemporary cases in the region. Furthermore, it introduces several theories related to studies of protest and social movements. The course consists of lectures, discussions, and student presentations.