'EU in Practice' was established back in autumn 2011 by Professor Maurice Fraser, then Head of the European Institute, and Anthony Teasdale, who had just become a Visiting Fellow, to bring practitioners and commentators into the School to discuss how ‘politics and power in the Brussels system’ (the subtitle of the series) really operate.
‘When we put the first series together, we had only five speakers for the term and we did not know whether it would really attract an audience’, says Anthony, now Head of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) in Brussels and a Visiting Professor in Practice at the Institute. ‘We just decided to launch the seminars and see whether they met a real need’.
The series ran to a second term and a third, and then became an established feature of Institute life, with eight speakers now invited in each Autumn and Winter Term, to share their personal experience and analysis of the EU political system. Twenty-one series later, with almost 150 speakers so far, ‘The EU in Practice’ keeps going from strength to strength, offering a unique forum in which LSE students and faculty can interact with EU policy-makers and commentators, as well as other academics writing about Europe, outside the constraints of a formal course.
With Maurice Fraser’s sad death five years ago, Martin Westlake - the former Secretary-General of the EU Economic and Social Committee and now also a visiting professor in practice at the Institute - joined Anthony in organising and co-presenting the series. ‘We want to replicate a fireside chat, without the fire’, says Martin, ‘and give students the chance to talk on equal terms with movers and shakers whom they might not otherwise have the chance to meet.’
The list of speakers so far reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of European politics - they include Cathy Ashton, Vernon Bogdanor, Kenneth Clarke, Catherine Day, Heather Grabbe, John Kerr, Neil Kinnock, Brigid Laffan, Alain Lamassoure, Gina Miller, David O’Sullivan, Peter Mandelson, Luuk van Middelaar, Ana Palacio, Julian Priestley, Vivien Schmidt, Pierre Vimont, Stephen Wall and Klaus Welle. The last of these, Klaus Welle, Secretary General of the European Parliament, was the very first speaker in 2011 and the series hopes to welcome him back next year.
The latest ‘EU in Practice’ series runs on Friday afternoons at 4.30pm (London time) - the seminars are currently taking place online - from 8th October to 3rd December 2021. Speakers this term include Emily O’Reilly, the European Ombudsman; Richard Corbett, the former MEP who is serving on the staff of the Conference on the Future of Europe; and Robert Zoellick, the former President of the World Bank.
Find out more information about the ‘EU in Practice’ series here.