Schmidt Gives Talks at UBC, Simon Fraser University

Vivien SchmidtProfessor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, gave two recent talks in Vancouver on Europe’s crisis of legitimacy and the rhetoric of discontent. 

On October 18, 2018, Schmidt gave a talk at the Simon Fraser University Department of Political Science entitled “The Rhetoric of Discontent:On the Transatlantic Rise of Populism.”

Schmidt gave an October 19, 2018 talk at the University of British Columbia’s Institute of European Studies as part of the European Transitions Speaker Series entitled “Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy:  Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers.”

Read the abstract of the talk below:

Although ‘Brexit’ and the refugee crisis have grabbed today’s headlines, the European Union’s sovereign debt crisis continues to be of major concern. The Eurozone’s comparatively poor economic performance and continued political divisiveness have combined with processes focused on ‘governing by rules and ruling by numbers’ to generate a crisis not just of economics and politics but also of democratic legitimacy. Professor Schmidt argues that the EU’s (euro) crisis of legitimacy centers on problems related to (a lack of) policy effectiveness, political responsiveness, and procedural quality. But she also contends that in pursuit of legitimacy as much as in response to deteriorating economics and increasing political volatility, EU institutional actors – ECB, Council, Commission, and EP – incrementally reinterpreted the rules and recalibrated the numbers ‘by stealth,’ that is, without admitting it in their public discourse. To theorize about such processes of ideation innovation and discursive legitimation during the Eurozone crisis, Prof. Schmidt uses the neo-institutionalist framework of discursive institutionalism.

Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. Her research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. In 2018, she was appointed as a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor — France’s highest honor. She has published a dozen books, over 200 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).  She is a 2018 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for a US-EU comparative study of the ‘rhetoric of discontent.’