Europe looks to UW for analysis, advice

In an unusual move, the European Parliament earlier this month invited UW–Madison professor Jonathan Zeitlin to testify at a parliamentary hearing on the European Employment Strategy, a new approach to policy coordination among the European Union’s member states launched in 1997.

Zeitlin, the co-director of the UW–Madison’s European Union Center, and a professor of history, sociology and industrial relations, appeared as the lead external expert July 8 at a hearing in Brussels of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee.

“It’s remarkable that they would ask an American to comment on such a core issue in European public policy,” says Zeitlin. “But researchers on both sides of the Atlantic look to us since we have a concentration of expertise in this area that rivals anything in Europe.”

Zeitlin points to the European Union Center’s groundbreaking research and scholarship in the areas of work, welfare and governance. The center, one of 15 in the United States, is now in its fourth year. In June, the European Union Center, and the Center on World Affairs and the Global Economy organized a conference in Brussels on the open method of coordination, an experimental approach to European governance based on benchmarking of national progress toward commonly agreed objectives.

In September, Zeitlin will deliver a keynote address to a conference organized by the European Union’s Committee of the Regions on “Improving European Governance? The Open Method of Coordination.” With his colleague and European Union Center co-director David Trubek, he has completed an edited volume, “Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments,” to be published in 2003 by Oxford University Press. Trubek, Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and WAGE director, is also the co-editor (with Cambridge University’s Joanne Scott) of a special issue of the European Law Journal entitled “Law and New Approaches to Governance,” published in March 2002.