Schmidt, Martin Interviewed on Teaching Europe
Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and Cathie Jo Martin, Director of the Center for the Study of Europe at the Pardee School and Professor of Political Science at Boston University, were recently interviewed on European integration and global political economy.
Schmidt and Martin were interviewed by the Europe Now at the Center for European Studies for an article entitled “Teaching Europe.”
From the text of the article:
EuropeNow What first interested you about studying Europe and/or the European Union (EU)? How was European integration taught to you?
Cathie Jo Martin So, Vivien knows more about the EU than anyone I know. She was chair of the European Union Studies Association, for example. I know something about some European countries. I was chair of the Council for European Studies (CES) and know the national level better than the European level.
Vivien Schmidt But importantly, we both started out from the same place – from comparative politics. I focused on France first, but it became impossible to study France without understanding the EU. By the mid-1990s, it became increasingly clear to me that you cannot understand the national level without understanding the EU in a whole range of areas. So, the question of how European integration was taught to us – neither of us ever had it taught because it was before most people were interested.
Cathie Jo Martin Right. We knew about the European Economic Community but the Treaty of Maastricht happened in 1991 – we were already professors by then. So, the way I really learned about the EU was through the CES and talking to people there about what was going on.
Vivien Schmidt And in the 1990s, the study of European integration was basically focused on, “Who are the drivers of integration?” It was very much intergovernmentalists versus supranationalists in interminable debates that got nowhere. It was only in the early 2000s that the national and the EU are actually connected, with a move from European integration to Europeanization and that’s when I became much more interested. Studying the EU became more about the policy impact and issues of democracy, that is, the impact on the polity. But, then it also depends on what policy area you look at. If you look at the welfare state, that doesn’t come into EU negotiations until much later. In comparative politics many people didn’t actually get to the impact of the EU until the Eurozone crisis. And then all of a sudden, it’s very big.
Schmidt is a Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. Her research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. She has published ten books, over 100 scholarly journal articles or chapters in books, and numerous policy briefs and comments, most recently on the Eurozone crisis. Her current work focuses on democratic legitimacy in Europe, with a special focus on the challenges resulting from the Eurozone crisis, and on methodological theory, in particular on the importance of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism).
Cathie Jo Martin is professor of Political Science at Boston University and former chair of the Council for European Studies. Her most recent book, The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth and Equality (co-authored with Duane Swank, Cambridge University Press 2012) investigates the origins of coordinated capitalism and the circumstances under which employers are persuaded to endorse social policies promoting economic productivity and social solidarity.