Professor Martin WESTLAKE
Academic assistant: Íñigo MARTÍN MONTERRUBIO
This seminar is intended to provide a critical framework for advanced research into the main issues and processes of the constitutional, institutional and political reform of the European Union and of its institutions and procedures. It will focus on the reform issues which have arisen out of the euro zone crisis, Brexit, the migration crisis, the prospect of further enlargements, climate change, trade relations, Covid-19 and previous reform processes leading from the Declaration of Laeken (2001) to the implementation of the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon reforms to the recent Conference on the Future of Europe. The seminar will bring a critical eye to bear on the whole concept and process of reform. How are reforms generated? Where do reform ideas and proposals come from? In what circumstances? How are they sustained? How is their success measured, if at all? If nothing changes subsequent to reforms, were those reforms necessary? Or, on the other hand, would the situation have been worse if they hadn’t been implemented? What is the difference, if any, between reform and change? How is continuity ensured? Is the very term ‘reform’ a misnomer? And is there any sort of collective memory of the reasoning behind various reform processes?