Europaeum Scholars: catching up with Florence
As the Europaeum Scholars programme is open for applications, we caught up with Florence, who was part of the 2022-2023 cohort.
The Europaeum Scholars programme is a unique two-year course taken alongside a doctorate, in which students undergo policy and leadership training, and develop a project to make Europe a better place. After her previous blogpost, we had a few questions about the experience of being a Europaeum scholar.
The Europaeum Scholars programme has 7-8 modules, held at leading universities across Europe. Which module was your favourite?
My favourite module was Bologna. Housed in a magnificent Renaissance castle and monastery in the Italian countryside, we learned about democracy in Europe through a palette of highly interesting sessions. These included panels on topics such as populism, disinformation, digital democracy, and foreign policy. We were also very honored to meet the illustrious Romano Prodi, twice Prime Minister of Italy and 10th president of the European Commission, who gave us a talk on the role of Europe in the current state of global politics – a much-needed eye-opener.
You are the first Classics Scholar on the Europaeum Scholars programme. How did your knowledge of Europe in Antiquity allow you to address Europe today?
I like to say that a lot of the values, principles, and standards of ancient Greece and Rome have fossilised into the cultural bedrock of the West. This affects politics as much as art, literature, or philosophy: across Europe, America and Canada, our ideas about democracy and political power are derivatives (more or less directly depending on the instances) of values championed by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even our political and legal institutions take inspiration from Antiquity. Whilst the world of today deals with challenges no-one could have foreseen two thousand years ago, my knowledge of the ancient world proved to be very useful in finding parallels and continuations of challenges we face today. My research on human trafficking, for example, was strikingly suitable to our session on gang-affected women. In another session, we were asked to imagine a “worst case scenario” of the downfall of democracy and how it could happen in today’s Europe. While my colleagues chose issues such as growing wealth inequalities and aging demographics, I drew a parallel with the end of the Roman Republic: a silent transition to an authoritative regime marked by the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a few, creating an effectively ungovernable oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. The ancient world might seem very distant from our day-to-day problems, but it is a remarkably reliable source of comparative material!
As part of the programme, Europaeum Scholars work in multidisciplinary teams, with the challenge to produce a project that will ‘make Europe a better place.’ What was your project? How did it go?
My group and I worked on a project called Portal2EU, concerning participatory democracy and citizen consultation processes. In one of our modules, a speaker addressed the fact that EU citizens tend not to engage with policies beyond voting in elections – even for issues that directly affect them. This led us to have a look at current citizen consultation programs and see how they could be improved to increase citizen involvement. We focused on the EU’s ‘Have Your Say!’ platform, and after 18 months of intensive research, we came out with a three-pronged proposal which recommended changes to the platform in terms of outreach, transparency, and accessibility.
Our group did not win the final prize of the Europaeum Scholars Programme, but our work has been recognised by the OECD and will be published as a chapter in an upcoming volume. I am very pleased to say we have been invited to speak at a conference at OECD Headquarters in Paris which will take place next week, as part of the event for the 10th meeting of the Partnership of International Organisations for Effective International Rulemaking, to present our research alongside the other authors.
Thank you to Florence for answering our questions. The Europaeum Scholars programme applications close on Sunday 26 November at 1200. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to know more about the Europaeum. We wish our students all the best with their applications!