2023 | Hanspeter Kriesi
European Politics in Times of Crisis
The Lucerne Master Class 2023 took place from October 17th to 20th 2023 with Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Kriesi (European University Institute, Florence) on the topic "European Politics at a Time of Crises".
European Politics in Times of Crisis
The EU has experienced a series of crises which tested its resilience – the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, the Brexit crisis, the rule-of-law crisis, the Covid-19 crisis and now the Ukraine crisis. It has been far from evident that it would survive the successive challenges of these crises. The SOLID project, an ERC-Synergy project of which the scholar teaching the Master Class is one of the PIs, is currently studying how the EU has responded to these crises and with what kind of success.
Based on the approach and preliminary results of this ongoing project, the Lucerne Master Class will analyze the EU’s crises responses and their impact on the EU’s resilience. It will do so by situating the theoretical approach of the project in the context of classic approaches to the European integration process, by providing in-depth analyses of two crises – the refugee and the Covid-19 crisis – and by discussing how the EU’s responses can be compared across crises.
Hanspeter Kriesi | European University Institute, Florence
Hanspeter Kriesi was born in 1949 in Bischofszell (Switzerland). He studied sociology at the Universities of Bern, Zurich and Chicago. He obtained his PhD in sociology at the University of Zurich (1976), where he also did his Habilitation in sociology (1980). In 1984 he became a professor for collective political behaviour at the University of Amsterdam. In 1988, he went to the University of Geneva, where he taught as a professor of comparative and Swiss politics until 2002, when he took up the chair for comparative politics at the University of Zurich. He was the Stein Rokkan Chair holder at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence from 2012 to 2020. He is now part-time professor in the Department and a Principal Investigator of the SOLID project, in collaboration with Maurizio Ferrera and Waltraud Schelkle. In Fall 2022, he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Lucerne.
