Outline Program
Lectures and Conferences
The Chambery Summer Session June 16th to July 12th, 2008
Lecture Topics :
- The European Union and The Single Market
- European Monetary System and the Single Currency (Euro)
- European Social Model
- Cross-Culture Issue In Europe
- Central Europe and The Enlargement Issues
- European Union trade policies Toward: China, USA, ACP and Latina America
- Deregulation and Public Sector Management in Europe
- Budget and Agriculture Policies
- French Language
1. The European Union and the Single Market
The single market is the core of today’s Union.
To make it happen, the EU institutions and the member countries strove doggedly for seven years from 1985 to draft and adopt the hundreds of directives needed to sweep away the technical, regulatory, legal, bureaucratic, and cultural and protectionist barriers that stifled free trade and free movement within the Union.
They won the race against time, but the victory passed largely unnoticed by the public. The single market never fired the popular imagination in the way the single currency, the other big EU event of the recent years, did.
As the former European Commission president and instigator of the whole project, Jacques Delors, remarked: “you can’t fall in love with the single market”. This lecture will highlight and analyse these important moment of the building of one Europe.
2. European Monetary System and the Single Currency
The lecture analyses and describes European monetary integration from 1991 to 1999 as well as the important debates surrounding it.
The period between the signature of the Treaty of Maastricht and the beginning of the third stage of Economic and Monetary Union was rich in events and sudden developments.
Despite all the doubts and criticisms, the progression of the preparation for the single currency followed its course.
As the project aiming to endow the European Community with a single currency was based on both economic and political considerations, it was inevitable that the strong controversies around the project would be based on these two sorts of considerations.
The focus here will be on France, and the students will learn how French population was divided in two parties regardless of their political and ideological thought.
3. European Social Model
This lecture will offer a reflection on the current evolution of the European Social Model. This question concerns any researcher working in the field of European integration.
First, we will analyse the theoretical concept of the European Social Model which has different disciplinary aspects.
We will examine some specific legal building-blocks that help to build/rebuild this notion:
- the role of the European Constitution and of the social fundamental rights therein
- the position of the ECJ after Enlargement
- the development of European citizenship
- the social welfare of persons
- workers' involvement in economic decisions
- increase -or not- of social democracy through the new modes of governance.
4. Cross Cultural Issues
In this lecture student will learn from the opportunities which the EU offers its citizens for living, studying and working in other countries make a major contribution to cross-cultural understanding, personal development and the realisation of the E.U’s full economic potential.
5. The European Union Trade Policy
The EU’s basic philosophy is that it will open its market to imports from outside provided its trading partners do likewise.
It is also keen to liberalise trade in services. But it is ready to make allowances for developing countries by allowing them to open their markets more slowly than industrialised countries and is helping them integrate into the world trading system.
These lecture overviews of the EU trade activities towards the rest of the worlds.
6. European Union and Enlargement Issues
Enlargement offers the unique opportunity of ending the artificial divide which has split the European continent into two for most of the past 60 years.
Not only will individuals be able to move study and work freely across frontiers, but businesses and economies in central and Eastern Europe should prosper as a market-based economy takes root.
Europe as a whole will also benefit economically and politically with the creation of a domestic market of 500 million people.
Should European Union continue its enlargement? Where should end European Union’s border?
Important debate will be around Turkish integration in Europe!
7. Deregulation and public Sector Management in Europe
In this lecture we will attempt to describe the compatibility of various administrative reforms with its distinct administrative traditions.
A wide variety of specific reforms can be grouped into a relatively few categories.
The four major state traditions in Western Europe and North America are as follows:
- Anglo-Saxon (minimal state)
- Continental European: Germanic (organicist)
- Continental European: French (Napoleonic)
- Scandinavian (mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic)
8. European Union Budget and Agriculture Policy
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is comprised of a set of rules and mechanisms, which regulate the production, trade and processing of agricultural products in the European Union (EU), with attention being focused increasingly on rural development.
The significance of the CAP, nowadays, is also portrayed by the fact that it is directly related to the Single Market and the EMU.
The Treaty of Rome defined the general objectives of a common agricultural policy. The principles were set out at the Stresa Conference in July 1958. Explanation will be given to foreign student to understand the entire dispute between France and Great Britain.
