The European Union Center

Activities

In 2001-02, the European Union Center is organizing five interdisciplinary conferences and workshops focusing on various themes of EU-US interactions over issues raised by the New Economy.

The first, which was held in the fall of 2001, focused on the political economy of comparative finance mechanisms in the E-economy. Reexamining the standard literature in the context of a digital environment, the conference investigated the relationships between various financial systems, on the one hand, and socio-political activities on the other. This conference brought together academics and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the evolving effect of venture capital and equity markets on US and EU economies.

Read more about this project at the IES website.

A second interdisciplinary conference, held in Europe during the spring of 2002, will explore the development of intellectual property, software patents, and contending business models, as Open Source becomes more mainstream under slightly different legal regimes.

A third conference on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) will convene at the European University Institute in the spring of 2002. This interdiscipinary group of European and American scholars has been documenting events in the Barcelona Process since 1995, analyzing both the opportunities and constraints facing the regional community-building efforts in the Mediterranean area -- including Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Along with issues of immigration, stability, and economic development, the groups will consider impacts of the digital revolution on the EMP process. Papers generated for this conference will be published in the IES workin gpaper series, on the EU website, and as a book volume. A future goal of this project in subsequent years is the initiation of "two-track" diplomatic exchanges in which the Berkeley EU Center serves as an "honest broker" in the exchanges among participants.

Read more about this project at the IES website.

A fourth conference, to be held at Berkeley in the Spring of 2002, will focus on the Southern European states of Portugal, Spain, and Greece. European and American participants will examine the impact of EU membership on the states' civil societies, political institutions, and economic development, as well as explore the impact that these member states have had on EU processes, priorities, and institutions. A session will be incuded to address the three states' roles in EU E-economy developments This conference will lay the groundwork for a transatlantic study group that will convene in the spring of 2003.

Read more about this conference [~66k pdf].

A fifth conference focuses on the emergence of new "transregional" trading arrangements. Given the crisis facing the WTO, and recent overtures of the EU, this interdisciplinary group of scholars will examine the emergence of "tansregionalism" -- the pursuit of formalized commercial relationships between two distinct regions -- including a comparison of the two possible explanations for transregional agreements:

the role of systemic power balancing, and
the political struggle between "new economy" and old economy actors as driving forces.

The group will continue its collaboration in subsequent years, leading to the publication of working papers and an edited volume.

Read more about this project at the IES website.

Update: 2003-04

The UC Berkeley European Union Center is organized thematically around EU-US interactions over issues raised by Europe's Changing Geography and New Economy. In 2002-2003, The Center concentrated its resources on three tools to enhance understanding and links between academics, practitioners, students, and civil society in the US and Europe: conferences and workshops, publications and outreach, and academic teaching and research. These activities help to create the framework for a new generation of academic and applied work on transatlantic concerns.

Its activities focus in part on the emerging information society technologies and the questions that are posed for governments, enterprise, and citizens in a knowledge-based economy. Europe's emerging information society is unfolding against another set of sweeping changes brought by EU enlargement; and the research explicitly examines Europe's changing political, social, and economic geography. It also looks at how Europe's changing geography affects and is affected by technological developments. Research will also, in this era of strain on European American relations, consider carefully the political security domain. These foci are designed to build on existing institutional and academic strengths, to take advantage of our San Francisco Bay Location, and to respond to developments in the outside world to which academic scholarship should relate.

In 2002-2003 IES on behalf of the EU Center initiated projects focused on "Europe's Changing Geography," a theme that is intended to focus IES research and outreach initiatives for the next four years. IES has initiated a number of research, conference, workshop, curricular innovations, and seminar initiatives around these themes. Moreover IES visiting scholars have addressed these themes as they have assisted local research efforts and facilitated collaboration with Berkeley faculty and graduate Students. Visiting scholar Meinholf Dierkes worked with IES faculty to flesh out the overall theme.

Europe's economic geography has been transformed with the continued progress of the single market, the advent of the euro, and the impending enlargement to the East. As part of that initiative, the EU Center held a conference on the EU's trans-regional trade relations. Individual faculty members and graduate students conducted research on EU-induced financial liberalization and its consequences and nuclear energy in the new accession states. IES supported undergraduate research on EU Capital Market Integration, EMU, and the Decision-Making Process in the ECB, Immigration Policies and Labor Markets in the EU.

The EU's political geography is changing, with the convening of a constitutional convention to redefine notions of sovereignty and modalities of governance and regulation. To examine this theme in more detail, the EU Center and IES held a workshop examining the impact of EU membership on the quality of democracy in the "new" member states of southern Europe. IES, BRIE, and the EU Center supported a research group on "The State after Statism," and IES scholars in the EU Center continued to explore transatlantic relations in the context of the Euro-Med process and the Mediterranean region as a whole. IES undergraduates researched the design of EU institutions for more effective governance and various Regulatory Approaches to the Bioscience and Energy Sectors. On behalf of the EU Center, IES graduate students researched the rise of the Green party in Germany and terrorist challenges to the democratic state.

Europe's cultural geography is changing, as its population becomes increasingly diverse and as immigration becomes an increasingly important cultural issue. Together, IES and the EU Center sponsored two pre-dissertation fellowships on ethnic integration and discrimination in Europe and IES undergraduates examined problems of regional Conflict and nationalism in the EU.

Europe's strategic geography is changing in response to American unilateralism and the growing desire to formulate a common European foreign policy. Visiting scholar Jost Halfmann co-organized an EU Center-IES lecture series on "transatlantic turbulence, and with support of the EU Center and IES, UC undergraduates examined EU foreign policy and the CSFP as well as The EU's role in international relations more generally.

BRIE activities sponsored by the EU Center for 2002-2003, remained centered on issues of the New Economy. Public policy and governance issues loom large as digital communications networks become increasingly important and ubiquitous in the New Economy. The new era of digital networks has reframed traditional policy approaches and legal structures as policy areas interpenetrate and formerly discrete frameworks of legal rules begin to overlap. Their interplay has become a central concern of European and American policymakers and a fundamental difficulty in fashioning public policy appropriate for an era defined by the ubiquity of digital networks. Our activities and outreach agenda aim to consider these policy issues which will shape the dynamics of economic growth, competition, regulation, productivity, R&D development, emerging economies, and national and network security. The particular foci of BRIE's activities for 2002-2003 can be broken down into the following themes.

The first theme relates to the financing growth in the new economy. The evolving public policy and governance environment of the information society have clear implications for the evolving European models for growth. Activities sponsored by the EU Center aim to contribute to a coherent yet comprehensive understanding of the changes financial regulation and governance brought on by recent technological innovations and market dynamics. The second theme deal with the evolution and regulation of communication and data networks and infrastructure. This thematic focus will assess next generation networks as drivers of change in economy and society. Research will touch on issues such as how the digital tools change the terms of competition in various markets, the patterns of use (public and private) driving the development of next-generation digital infrastructures, new and innovative production patterns are emerging in next generation networks and software. The next thematic foci constitute less traditional, but newly and differently important issues. The third concerns the relationship between IT and emerging markets issues. Here activities supported with EU Center funds investigate the influence of the new information networks on the economic trajectories of the new member states, assessing special opportunities as well as potential obstacles to experimentation and diffusion. A key goal of this focus is to assess how emerging markets can animate and harness paths of technology innovation and development. Our last, fourth, theme addresses the dynamic between IT and national/digital security issues. Digital technologies cast both security and privacy in new lights, and potentially alter trade-offs among them. Concerns with national and community security blur into concerns about the instruments and means of cyber-security.

EU Center support is crucial to the proposed research initiatives and to the design of research roadmaps that will guide the debate amongst the groups and feed the dissemination of best practice to a broad audience of stakeholders, business leaders and policymakers. Given the US strength in the digital economy, a transatlantic dialogue is an essential part of the project. Europe has achieved impressive successes in some areas of IST, yet lags behind in others. By developing a deep understanding of the repercussions of recent technological and organisational innovations, the project aims to reinforce Europe's strengths in areas where it has established industrial and technology leadership, as well as boost European competitiveness in areas where it has lagged. Europe's transformation, of course, does not occur in isolation. An explicit effort is made to bring to bear on the European choices the implications of existing ongoing American work and debate.

IIS's Conversations with History project remained a central feature of the activities sponsored by the UC Berkeley EU Center. The Institute of International Studies has continued to make European ideas and issues an important component of its highly successful Conversations with History project series, a collection of more than 270 interviews with distinguished individuals ranging from statesmen and scientists to activists and artists; the interviews span the globe and include discussion of political, economic, military, legal, cultural, and social issues shaping our world. This project has emphasized creating new interviews and creating an online archive of interviews from previous years. In the 2002-03 cycle, IIS held a number of new interviews in which European perspective were brought to the attention of a wider public. These are further detailed in the body of the report. In addition, the Institute is making available as video-on-demand interviews done in past years. The EU Center brings a distinct European accent to this interview archive, and continues to introduce the voices of European academics and policy-makers to the US public.