EPS chair group receives Horizon 2020 Grant to Investigate Differentiated Integration in the EU

A new project that aims to investigate differentiated integration in the EU, with key contributors from the RUG Chair of European Politics & Society, is set to begin in 2019.

The project received a grant of 3,000,000 EUR from the Horizon 2020 Framework programme, and will run for three years, beginning in January 2019. The RUG-EPS team will work alongside a pan-European consortium of 15 Universities and think tanks, coordinated by the Rome-based Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI).

The project plans to examine the nature, evolution, politics and prospects of differentiated integration in the European Union, at a time at which differentiation seems to be among the most viable avenues for the future of the Union. The project will investigate a number of themes and questions related to differentiated integration, such as: what has driven institutional and policy differentiation with the EU thus far? What are the most effective forms of differentiation, and the most promising future directions? Finally, how to reconcile differentiation with democracy and legitimacy within the Union?

The RUG unit will be coordinated by Dr. Pier Domenico Tortola, alongside Prof. Lars Rensmann and Dr. Stefan Couperus, who are all members of the Chair in European Politics & Society. Their unit will work primarily within two work packages of the project: one tackling the topic of differentiation from a historical and conceptual standpoint, and the other analysing a number of governance issues related to differentiation, and exploring innovative avenues of differentiation involving transnational networks of local and regional actors.