Message from the Executive Director

Dear EUPS Alumni and Friends,

After a cold winter, the Florentine spring is making its first tentative appearance. The Easter cart (Scoppio del Carro) has sent its fireworks onto Piazza Duomo. Strawberries, cherries, apricots, and peaches will soon fill local markets, and the Oltrarno’s hillsides will soon take on the scent of thousands of blossoms in the Giardino delle rose.

The spirit of renewal is also in the air for the EUPS program. As many readers know, EUPS students have been active in southeastern Europe over the past couple of summers. In both 2016 and 2017, two EUPS students interned with public offices in the Republic of Kosovo, and this partnership will continue in 2018. In a new front of cooperation, the program will also host a broader southeast European conference at the end of April. The conference will bring together students, faculty members, and staff from JMU, the University of Zagreb (Croatia), the University of Pristina (Kosovo), and our long-standing partners at the University of Florence and the European University Institute. Graduate students from each university will share their research on the possible futures of “wider Europe” and on Europe’s place in the global political order.

While the notion of EU enlargement has stagnated in recent years, it received a bit of a push in February, when Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, identified 2025 as a loose target date for EU expansion to the Western Balkans. There is, of course, much work to be done—in the EU, in the Balkans, and beyond—if this target is to be achieved. Conference participants, though, will do much to explore the conditions that might promote and obstruct further enlargement into the Western Balkans. More broadly, they will explore the political, social, cultural, and other costs and benefits of enlargement to the southeast.

We hope that the April event will be more than a “mere” academic conference. In line with the university’s goal to be the model of the engaged university, student participants will use the second half of the conference week to interact with broader populations. Specifically, they will form international student teams—comprising Americans, Croatians, Kosovars, Italians, and perhaps (via Erasmus) a few others—and help to lead Italian high school students in a consideration, through analysis of film, of the similarities and differences among various “directional” Europes (north, south, east, and west) as of 2018. This new project will reflect lots of cooperation with partners old and new, and I am excited to see what will come of it. Keep an eye on EUPS social media channels and the JMU Scholarly Commons paper repository (http://commons.lib.jmu.edu) in the final week of April to see how the conference events unfold.

As discussed in the Fall 2017 issue of the newsletter, the EUPS alumni advisory board is also spearheading new initiatives. At its most recent (March 2018) meeting, the board discussed a plan for institutionalizing relationships between EUPS alumni mentors, on one hand, and students in the program, on the other. To this end, board members and I will be reaching out to all alums in the coming weeks, asking a few short and direct questions about alums’ current professional placements.  Note that this will not be a full-blown “alumni survey” (e.g., the kind of survey that I send to alums once every couple of years). Rather, it will be a short Google form asking for information about the sector of work alums work in, the geographic location of their operations, and a (very) few other simple pieces of information. We hope to use this information to establish relationships, beginning as early as Summer 2018 and requiring a few hours of work, between current students and alums, with the goal of assisting students’ professional development. Please keep your eyes open, alums, for additional information.

There are also exciting new things happening within the broader “JMU Europe” community. For the first time this spring, for example, JMU sent a group of three undergraduate students to Washington, DC to compete in the Schuman Challenge, a rigorous intercollegiate debate competition hosted by the EU Delegation. The Schuman Challenge provides a “spring balance” to the Mid-Atlantic EU Simulation, another DC-based event that JMU students have been participating in each of the last three falls. Such events help to shore up our presence in DC and to spread the word that JMU is committed to transatlantic cooperation and insight. Of course, we also seek to make the latter point in various events in and around Harrisonburg. Faculty colleagues and I participated in a public talk, for example, on “Brexit: Democratic Triumph or Democratic Decline?” EUPS student work will again (for the fourth year running) have a presence at JMU’s annual Graduate Showcase of Scholarship and Creative Activities. And we are planning a scholarly workshop featuring cutting-edge research on EU institutional dynamics in July 2018.

Alas, it is more difficult (but perhaps not impossible?) to find blooms of hope and renewal in Italian politics. As most readers know, Italy’s general election took place in early March, and the intrepid Caterina Paolucci, in this issue, helps us to understand their implications—for Italy, for Europe, and for the world. Elsewhere in the issue, we gain insights into alumni trajectories. R. Adrian Garcia-Esteve (M.A. 2015) reflects from his office in Brussels. Dr. Gemma Scalise, who is currently leading our course on topics in economic and social policy, inquires into the patterns of migration that characterize today’s Europe and their implications for European identities. McKenzie Otus (x2018) reports on the way that she and other Florentines marked international women’s day in March, and  Sara Leming (x2018) provides insight into a place where all EUPS students have spent leisure time.

One final note: many alums made contributions to the program on JMU Giving Day (March 13, 2018). Grazie tante! – gifts of any size help us to train the next generation of international policy professionals. They allow us to support student travel, to promote career development, and to make the program visible in new and innovative ways. 

Tanti saluti, e forza JMU!

John A. Scherpereel
Executive Director, M.A. Program in Political Science, EUPS concentration