My European Journey
It began in Weimar, Thuringia—under the fading shadow of the short-lived 1919 Weimar Republic and the East-West divide of postwar Germany.
It continued through studies in West Germany: at the Leibniz-Kolleg in Tübingen, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Bielefeld, and the universities of Munich (Political Science) and Hamburg (Modern Chinese). As a field researcher and journalist, I explored post-Franco Spain from Madrid and Barcelona into its emerging autonomous regions, before completing a PhD in social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence.
As lecturer, researcher, visiting and full professor I taught comparative political sociology and European integration at universities in Barcelona, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Koblenz-Landau, Cornell, and Bremen. I supported EU academic exchange and cooperation initiatives in Russia, China and India, and held visiting roles in Mexico, Moscow and Manipal — sharing European studies across borders and disciplines.
In Bremen, I founded and chaired the Jean Monnet Centre for European Studies (CEuS, 2001–2016), helped launch the interdisciplinary BA in Integrated European Studies, and co-founded the Bremer Europa Zentrum to bring EU politics closer to citizens.
The euro and Brexit crises prompted me to write Europa erneuern—a democratic vision for the EU in the 21st century—and to stand as a B90/Grüne candidate in the 2019 European elections.
In 2021–2022, as an official observer of the Conference on the Future of Europe, I witnessed the EU’s most ambitious democratic innovation to date. This brought me back to Florence, to join the Democratic Odyssey project headed by my colleague Kalypso Nicolaidis at the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance. The Odyssey’s pilot People’s Assembly began in Athens (Sep 2024), travelling next to Florence (Feb 2025) and Vienna (May 2025). Since December 2024 I take part in the EU-funded ScaleDem project consortium (2024–2028), which seeks a grounded theory of scaling democratic innovations.
In this turbulent century, Europe’s democratic odyssey continues—demanding new forms of transnational politics and a civic culture of dialogue fit for a shared, sustainable planetary future.