Is the European Union Disunited By Diversity?

The European Union appears at a crossroads, struggling with its identity. Outwardly, a monolithic giant to be dealt with. Inwardly, at war with itself. Where is it going?

Speaker: Dr. Alasdair Young, Professor & Neal Family Chair, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech University

Speaker

Dr. Alasdair Young, Professor & Neal Family Chair, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech University

Alasdair Young is Professor and Neal Family Chair. He co-directs the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies, a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, and the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy. He held a Jean Monnet Chair (2012-15) and received the Ivan Allen College’s Distinguished Researcher Award in 2015. Beyond Georgia Tech, he is co-editor of JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies and was chair of the European Union Studies Association (USA) (2015-17). Before joining Georgia Tech in 2011 he taught at the University of Glasgow in the UK for 10 years. Prior to that, he held research posts at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and the University of Sussex, outside Brighton in the UK.

Alasdair has written five books, including Supplying Compliance with Trade Rules: Explaining the EU’s Responses to Adverse WTO Rulings (Oxford University Press, 2021). He has edited 15 other volumes, including the eighth edition of Policy-Making in the European Union with Mark Pollack, Christilla Roederer-Rynning, and Helen Wallace (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has published almost a score of refereed journal articles — including in Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Common Market Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Review of International Political Economy, and World Politics — and written more than 40 book chapters. He has performed consultancy work for the US and UK governments and for the European Commission.

About the European Union

The European Union (EU) is a unique economic and political union between 27 European countries. The predecessor of the EU was created in the aftermath of the Second World War. The first steps were to foster economic cooperation: the idea being that countries that trade with one another become economically interdependent and so more likely to avoid conflict. The result was the European Economic Community, created in 1958 with the initial aim of increasing economic cooperation between six countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

Since then, 22 more countries joined (and the United Kingdom left the EU in 2020) and a huge single market has been created and continues to develop towards its full potential. What began as a purely economic union has evolved into an organization spanning many different policy areas, from climate, environment, and health to external relations and security, justice, and migration.

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