Sussex European Institute

European Integration

The prominence of Sussex to the study of European integration cannot be understated, and is evident in various ways, including SEI Co-Director Jim Rollo's editorship of the Journal of Common Market Studies, the premier interdisciplinary journal on European integration, and the SEI's directorship of the ESRC's major One Europe or Several? programme (1999-2004), under the Institute's Founding Director Helen Wallace, Jim Rollo, Aleks Szczerbiak and Joerg Monar. This 26-project programme with a budget of over £4million resulted in a huge range of outputs, including 14 books, 70 working papers and policy briefs, and 70 conferences. It made a major contribution to understanding Europeanization in a period of rapid change when the diversity of a widening Europe presented serious challenges to traditional models of integration.

More recently the SEI's continuing position in the field has been further cemented by its involvement in two of the EU's Sixth Framework Research Networks of Excellence (CONNEX and CONSENT), and two Sixth Framework Integrated Programmes (NEWGOV and INTUNE). Professor Alan Mayhew is director of the Wider Europe programme, which is funded by the Jean Monnet Programme, the British and Polish governments, and Polish banks, which has sustained a network of economists, political scientists and lawyers working on the European Neighbourhood policy, and on Ukraine's relations with the EU since 2004.

Within the European integration cluster, Sussex has a number of more specific research foci: