European Integration and the Nation State : an Intractable Political Trade off?

LIEPP and the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics are glad to invite you to attend the seminar: 

European Integration and the Nation State: an Intractable Political Trade off? 

Tuesday April 23th, 2019

12h30- 14h30

Sciences Po, Room Goguel

27 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris

Please Register here

 Presentation: 

Maurizio Ferrera

Professor of Political Sciences

University of Milano

According to an established scholarly tradition on state-formation in Europe, the establishment and consolidation of the EU constitute a turning point in the long-term evolution of the European state system. The previous phases (state-building, nation-building, democratization and welfare-building) witnessed a continuous expansion of state powers and citizenship rights. The current phase has triggered off a reversal of this process, removing an increasing number of boundaries that nation states had built to protect their sovereignty and governing capacity. According to a well-known prediction of the Norwegian scholar Stein Rokkan – one of the founding fathers of the state-building tradition in sociology and political science - European integration was unlikely to develop beyond administrative and executive cooperation. This hypotheses has proved descriptively wrong. But it theoretical implications have been vindicated: Integration has seriously de-stabilized national systems – in particular their party and welfare systems. A growing tension has ensued, which risks to undermine the conditions not only for further integration, but possibly also for the very viability and durability of the EU as such. Are there ways for coping with this seemingly intractable and potentially destructive trade off?

 Discussion: 

Andreas Eisl

CEE 

MaxPo

Colin Hay

CEE Sciences Po