Amelie Kutter

Posts tagged ‘European Union’

Exercise in complexity and contingency: the example of the MES-Viadrina snap-shot simulation of EU legislation on asylum and migration

This paper, presented by Amelie Kutter at the DVPW Congress 2021, suggests that a neglected, but promising, potential of EU simulations is their function as exercises in complexity and contingency. If designed appropriately, simulation games not only reveal the complexity and contingency of EU politics (cognitive learning), but also the complexity and contingency of thinking about EU politics (cognitive-reflexive learning). Drawing on the example of a snap-shot simulation of the first reading of the EU’s New Pact on Asylum and Migration that was carried out as part of the lecture class ‘Introduction to the politics of the European Union’ at the MA European Studies unit of European University Viadrina, I will show such learning objective can be fostered in simulation game design.

Kutter, A. (2020) Construction of the Eurozone crisis: re- and depoliticising European economic integration

(Deutsch) The Eurozone crisis is among recent developments that upset the European Union (EU) most profoundly and sparked unprecedented contestation. This article adopts a discursive notion of politicisation and the frame of Discursive Political Studies to investigate whether that moment of contestation re-politicised EU economic governance in substantive terms. It argues that, while emerging counter-narratives of crisis projected alternative scenarios of economic integration and established a practice of constructive EU critique, they were co-opted by the dominant mass-mediated story of a public debt crisis.

Research collaboration: Advancing multiscalar social citizenship in Europe (2020…)

Recent  crises  have  revealed  that  access  to  social  rights, such as social security, short time work, housing, or health care is essential for the resilience of economies to external shocks, but also for sustaining social cohesion, trust and belonging in European societies. This collaborative project investigates the limits and potentials of transnational social citizenship in Europe. The objective is to map sources of social citizenship that have established at the EU’s different scales in law, policy, regulation, social work, and perceptions and discourses of social citizenship, and that might form part of a set of rights enforcible not only for EU migrants, but for those marginalised within their societies, too.

Kutter, A. (2020) Legitimation in the European Union: a discourse- and field-theoretical view

This book investigates how political authority and legitimacy is constructed in the postnational setting of the European Union. Drawing on the example of the EU constitutional debate, and the use of ‘EU constitutional speak’ in Polish and French broadsheets, more particularly, the book shows how claims for legitimacy transform while being transposed from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation to that of national media.