After several years of virtual conferences, UACES is finally back with a face-to-face event in Lille this year. The UACES conference, which takes place every year in early September, is a highlight in the academic calendar of European Studies. And as every year, the members of ESSCA’s EU*Asia Institute will actively contribute to the very dense and interesting programme.
The Institute’s expertise will be covered in several panels and presentations.
Innovation – Space Policy
Thomas Hoerber has set up a panel on European Space Policy with presentations from ESSCA’s standing research group on European space policies which has been researching in this field for more than 10 years with regular panels and workshops in UACES. This panel will focus on space policy as a particularly active and innovative field of European integration in recent years. It will analyse the history of European space policy, trends of its militarisation, and the related questions in European law and more widely, questions of justice and equality.
Our research fellows Antonella Forganni and Harald Köpping Athanasopoulos will contribute to this panel with presentations on ‘Space Global Sustainable Governance and International Treaties’ and ‘EU Discourse on Space Policy’.
EU-Asia Relations
Lin Goethals will chair this panel, which will look at the role of narratives in the relationship between Europe and China. The papers will discuss not only the content of narratives, but also how they emerge and change over time. The contributions therefore look at the main actors in the creation and transmission of narratives, their purpose and their influence on politics in Europe. In addition to narratives on specific policy areas, the panel will also address broader theoretical issues related to the use of narratives in the analysis of international relations.
Sustainability
This panel constitutes the third participation of the Research Network ‘The role of Europe in Global Challenges: Climate Change and Sustainable Development’ in the UACES Annual Conference. Under the umbrella of the ‘evolution of a European Environmental Conscience’, the network looks back at one of the most popular topics, energy, but also at the wider context: the commitment (internal and international) of the EU to become a low carbon, sustainable society. In doing so, this panel reflects on the use of the term ‘sustainability’ by both political parties and institutions, and the policies to achieve sustainability goals in the extremely challenging situation created by the Covid19 crisis.
Europe
Albrecht Sonntag has organised two exciting panels ‘France and the EU’ and ‘France in Europe – What’s next?’. The latter will adopt a non-traditional format where the panellist, three academics and three non-academic observers of French politics and society, will take a retroactive look at the first semester of 2022 and analyse its consequences.
In February 2022, our Institute hosted a public conference with Elisabeth Guigou and Joachim Bitterlich on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty (report and replay in French available here). This conference was followed by an academic workshop leading to a panel organised by Christoph Weber and Albrecht Sonntag.
The panel starts with a historical view of the Maastricht Treaty. The other presentations of the panel focus on the European Monetary Union, EU citizenship, and the CFSP.
