| Two professors, Gary Marks
and Marco Steenbergen, and two graduate students, David Scott and Carole
Wilson, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill organized a
conference funded by the North Carolina EU Center on "Dimensions
of Contestation in the European Union."
Participants in the project
are Chris Anderson, Mark Franklin, Matthew Gabel, Cees Van Der Eijk,
Simon Hix, Liesbet Hooghe, Doug Imig, Leonard Ray, Sidney Tarrow, and Jacques
Thomassen.
As the scope of European
integration has widened over the past decade, so its relevance to a wide
variety of political actors has increased. European integration has become
a major issue not just for the governments of EU member states, but also
for political parties, citizens, interest groups, and social movements.
These actors are engaged in intense debates about the future of European
integration. The issues are as complex as they are contested.
The question we ask in this
project is whether the debate over European integration, despite its complexity,
can be reduced to relatively small number of dimensions. In addition, we
want to explore the extent to which these dimensions differ across actors
and whether they have shifted over time. |
