European Union Politics

An advanced undergraduate seminar on the politics of the European Union, taught at Columbia in Spring 2023. The course works through the EU as a political system in its own right — its institutions, decision rules, and competences — and then turns to the substantive policy domains where European-level politics most visibly bites: the single market, monetary union, migration and external borders, enlargement, and the union’s halting moves toward a common foreign and security policy. A running thread is the question of how a polity without a demos manages to produce binding collective decisions, and at what cost.

Class sessions combined short framing lectures with discussion of primary documents, court rulings, and contemporary cases drawn from the news cycle of the term. Students wrote a short policy memo and a longer research paper on a topic of their choice, with the aim of leaving the course able to read European politics with the same conceptual fluency they would bring to American or comparative material.