EU487      Half Unit
European Integration from a Global Governance Perspective

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Distances on a world scale are shrinking through the emergence and thickening of networks of connection—a process commonly referred to as globalisation. This process is far from complete, with Europe being highly integrated while other regions lag behind. At the same time, globalisation and European integration face mounting pressures from geopolitical tensions, rising authoritarianism, economic protectionism, and democratic backsliding, challenging the foundations of the liberal order.

This course engages with recent positive and normative scholarship across various disciplines on governance in and beyond Europe. Putting European integration in a global and comparative perspective promises to illuminate current public and scholarly debates about the nature and future of European integration. We study these questions through four key issues: the nature of globalization; its actors, institutions, and processes; the form and scope of governance; and its normative implications.

For each of these themes, European integration will serve as the principal case study, examined in light of developments elsewhere in the world. The course provides students with a conceptual and thematic overview of European integration as a phenomenon of global governance. Rather than offering a descriptive introduction to specific global governance institutions or policy fields, the course is structured around current public and academic debates on European integration and global governance. These debates are analysed from the perspectives of political science and political economy, while also engaging with recent scholarship in Comparative Politics and Political Theory.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Research paper

Research paper

Students are required to summit a draft and a final non-assessed research paper outline in the WT. 

• Weiss, Thomas G., and Rorden Wilkinson (eds.). 2018. International Organization and Global Governance (2nd edition). Oxon and New York: Routledge.
• Schneider, Christina J. 2017. The political economy of regional integration. Annual Review of Political Science 20: 229-248.
• Rodrik, Dani. 2000. How Far Will International Economic Integration Go? The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (1): 177-186.

Essay (100%, 5000 words)

Students submit by the beginning of the following term a 5,000 word research essay. Deadlines to be confirmed in class.