Report: European Summer School 2019 "Europe Restart

In July 2019, EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy organized already the seventeenth annual European Summer School in Prague. This year’s programme was focused on the challenges that the European Union is currently facing, particularly from the perspective of Central European countries.

This year´s summer school ran under the title “Restarting Europe: Central European Perspective” and was attended by twenty-six students from seventeen different countries, coming to Prague from all over the world.  During seven intensive days, our students attended six lectures, two excursions, three interactive workshops, and also took part in many exciting free-time activities.

The academic programme started on Monday with a lecture delivered by Magdaléna Vášáryová, former Slovak diplomat, who introduced our students to the policies and perspectives of the Visegrad countries within the European context. She linked the whole lecture by a keyword “responsibility” of the young generation for our common future. Afterward, we continued by a lecture and discussion with Aleš Chmelař, the Deputy Minister for European Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, who focused on EU foreign policy. The next day´s main topic was migration, which was firstly addressed by a lecture from Christian Kvorning Lassen, EUROPEUM´s Deputy Director and Head of Research. In his lecture, Christian linked the “migration crisis” with the crisis of democracy in the EU, including the perspective of the V4 countries. Following this lecture, Adéla Jurečková and Anna Pacovská, from the Czech office of People in Need, continued with an interactive workshop about the ways media work with the topic of migration. Lucie Rivera and Stefano Cavagnetto, our long-term partners from Prague College, then led two lectures, focusing on the EU trading block as well as the future of competitiveness and social justice in the EU. After their lectures, Lucie and Stefano moderated an interactive workshop, during which our students tried to come up with an image of the EU they would like to build in the future. Jakub Dürr, Head of the Czech Permanent Representation to the EU, led the last lecture of our summer school. He spoke about the “Brussel’s bubble” and the possibilities of future development of the European Union.

Our students also had an opportunity to improve their presentation and debating skills during the workshop with Tereza Vicková, former president of a Debate club of the Charles University. Besides the lectures, we took part in the excursions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the Senate of the Czech Republic, where our students also met and had a discussion with the representatives of these institutions, Marek Janovský and Václav Hampl.

European Summer School 2019 was organized under the auspices of the Representation of the European Commission in the Czech Republic and in cooperation with Prague College and Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. Hereby, we would like to kindly thank our partners for cooperation and support.

For further information regarding the programme of the upcoming European Summer School, please visit our website www.essprague.eu

Miroslava Pisklová
Project Manager

Expertise: European security and defence, hybrid threats, Transatlantic relations, Slovak national and foreign policy