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Teaching the European Union: a Simulation of Council’s Negotiations

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Abstract

Simulations can be extremely successful in acquainting participants with a negotiation’s logic and process, especially in those political systems in which negotiations are prominent, such as the European Union (EU). After a brief introduction on the simulations in teaching the European integration, in this article we present, step-by-step, a simulation game on the adoption of a real piece of European legislation: the regulation that implemented the European Citizens’ Initiative, one of the main innovations of the Lisbon Treaty. Special attention is devoted to the different phases of a simulation design, from the choice of the topic, the choice and allocation of roles, the preparation of all the necessary documentation, to the debriefing and assessment phases. The article originates from a 4-year long study with undergraduate students from two Italian universities.

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Notes

  1. More specifically, this simulation is related to the adoption of the Regulation (EU) No. 211/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 February 2011 on the citizens’ initiative.

  2. Regulation (EC) No 1337/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2008 establishing a facility for rapid response to soaring food prices in developing countries.

  3. Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on improving the gender balance among non-executive directors of companies listed on stock exchanges and related measures /* COM/2012/0614 final – 2012/0299 (COD) */.

  4. Alternatively, instructors may ask students to prepare a report for a client as if they were consultants hired for a specific purpose. The clients would be the actors that take part in the negotiation (mainly national governments and political groups in the European Parliament) and they would ask the consultants to prepare for them a position paper (2–3 pages maximum) describing their main stakes in the negotiation. Such reports, which should be realistic and based on real information, could be then used by instructors to prepare the confidential instructions. In fact, each position paper could also be distributed to the participants together with the confidential instructions. It is suggested that the student who has prepared the position paper for a given client/country should not be asked to play that role in the simulation exercise.

  5. This document is available at http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/citizens_initiative/docs/com_2009_622_en.pdf.

  6. This document is available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0119:FIN:EN:PDF.

  7. This document is available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=REPORT&mode=XML&reference=A7-2010-350&language=EN.

  8. This press release is available at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-10-397_en.htm?locale=en.

  9. Respectively available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2010:267:0057:0063:EN:PDF and http://www.eesc.europa.eu/?i=portal.en.institutional-reform-opinions-resolutions-opinions.10571

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the two anonymous referees for reviewing the manuscript and for their valuable comments. Pierpaolo Settembri is an official of the European Commission. His views are expressed in a personal capacity and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. This article briefly illustrates what is broadly developed in Brunazzo and Settembri (2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, 26 - 38122, Via Verdi, Italy

    marco brunazzo

  2. European Commission, Rue de la Loi, Bruxelles, 200 - 1049, Belgium

    pierpaolo settembri

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  1. marco brunazzo
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  2. pierpaolo settembri
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Correspondence to marco brunazzo.

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brunazzo, m., settembri, p. Teaching the European Union: a Simulation of Council’s Negotiations. Eur Polit Sci 14, 1–14 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2014.34

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