The Jean Monnet Module titled ‘European Union: Deeper Integration by Overtaking Crisis’ is coordinated by Selin Türkeş-Kılıç at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Yeditepe University. The module supports the third-year undergraduate course ‘PSIR 332 European Union’ and provides an advanced level of knowledge on the functioning and integration capacity of the Union through the question of how the EU responds to major challenges such as Brexit, migration crisis and Euro crisis. Hence, students of the PSIR 332 course will be equipped with a comprehension of the degree of the EU’s resilience vis-à-vis crisis, which in return will enable the assessment of the EU’s future capacity for integration.
The EU is an evolving integration project which has successfully restored peace in Europe after two world wars and has contributed significantly to the economic, democratic, and political development within and across its borders. A great deal of European integration came as a response to the pressing needs of the conjuncture. This was indeed envisaged by Jean Monnet, the founding father of the European project: ‘Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises’ (Monnet, J. 1978. Memoirs. trans. R. Mayne Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 417). From this perspective, the question of how the EU responds to challenges and crises becomes closely related to what the EU is and what it may become in the future. This module thus aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the EU and its functioning with a specific focus on the recent challenges that it is going through. The project seeks to reach its goal by involving students, academics, policymakers, in a debate on the EU’s functional capacity to overtake crises with the following activities:
- Expert seminars
- Simulation training seminar for academics
- EU Council simulation workshop for students
- Roundtable debate with the participation of stakeholders
The module’s envisaged impacts are on introducing new methodologies to teaching EU studies in a way to enable deep-learning by the students; enhancing the dialogue among academic and policy circles; promoting interest in EU studies among the youth as well as the early career researchers and thus contributing to the production of high-caliber research on EU integration.
This year, 251 out of 1315 applications across Europe were deemed eligible for support. ‘European Union: Deeper Integration by Overtaking Crisis’ module has been one of the eight selected projects from Turkey.