Joris Melman
The public and the Euro: on legitimacy, visibility and politial imagination
ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo
ESR9 | joris.melman@arena.uio.no
PhD project
While the Euro is argued to be more and more bound up with the future of European integration, Europe’s single currency at the same time has increasingly come to be contested as an undemocratic straitjacket. Against this background, my project studies public opinion on the Euro. On the one hand, the purpose is to better understand its legitimacy. On the other, it is to gain insight in citizens’ legitimating reasoning. Given that the Euro’s politics have been impactful, but also distant and technical, this study uses them as a test case for the question how citizens deal with Europe’s ‘invisible constitution building’.
About me
In addition to my academic background, my thinking has been shaped by several other experiences. Professionally, I gained experience in a broad range of organizations, amongst which the Embassy of the Netherlands in New Delhi, De Groene Amsterdammer (the Netherlands' oldest newsmagazine), and fintech startup TAPP. In a more personal sense, several stays abroad might even have been more influential. I have been living in Istanbul and Delhi, and have traveled several times for longer periods to Asia, Africa and South America.
Education
- MSc in Political Science, Leiden University
- MA in Philosophy, University of Amsterdam
- BSc in Political Science, University of Amsterdam
Nationality
- Dutch
Supervisors
- Christopher Lord, ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo
- Dirk De Bièvre, Antwerp Centre for Institutions and Multilevel Politics (ACIM), University of Antwerp
- John Erik Fossum, ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo
