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Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence

The Centre for Britain and Europe (CBE) was awarded the prestigious Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence from the European Union for 2020-2023. 

Overview

30 years of Jean Monnet Activities

The Jean Monnet Programme is an initiative established by the European Union (EU) to promote excellence in teaching and research in the field of European integration studies. It is named after Jean Monnet, regarded as one of the founders of the European Union and a strong advocate for European integration.

EU logo "with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union

As a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, CBE plays a key role in reaching out to students from faculties not normally dealing with European Union issues as well as to policy makers, civil society and the general public at large, whilst offering experts the opportunity to create joint transnational activities. Additionally, CBE gathers the expertise and competences of high-level experts aiming to develop synergies between the various disciplines and resources in European studies.

Five pillars of Jean Monnet 

CBE’s initial Open Doors and Building Bridges programme is structured around four constitutive project strands, with one cross-thematic category of European/Britain activities. These are:

  • Gender and identity: Exploring the origins, impacts and consequences of rapidly shifting identity politics and gender politics in Europe and the UK on current and future integration.
  • Electoral behaviour: Researching the science of elections in Europe and Britain to discover the sources of both regressive tendencies, worsened by image and social media, and progressive trends of transparency, thematic advocacy (e.g. climate change) and youth-based interest.
  • European and British security and defence: Investigating the material and policy-based risks and opportunities arising within EU defence and security initiatives, and post-Brexit impacts on UK-EU security and defence structures, with member state findings from Poland, Germany, the UK, France and Belgium.
  • De-Europeanisation and re-Europeanisation: A two-fold exploration of the profound risks of ‘tipping points’ in key European phenomena. This includes populism, disenfranchisement and critical challenge in forms of European dis-integration including Euroscepticism, and the surprising new opportunities to reconnect, re-establish and re-communicate within and between EU politics and between the EU and the UK as post-membership entities.
  • Cross-thematic outputs: A range of entirely new teaching activities, research outputs, deliverables and events, tying together the substantive themes of identity/gender, security/defence, and de/re-Europeanisation.

In 2023, CBE’s work continues to evolve to encompass wider areas of global politics. These five pillars are now decanted into six areas of:

Past events