Heading for the Pan-European Conference on EU Politics

I'm currently at Arlanda Airport on my way to Tampere, a small city in central/southern Finland. I will be attending the Sixth Pan-European Conference on EU Politics organized by the European Consortium of Political Research.

I will be chairing a panel on Turkey-EU relations with papers that look at whatever happened to "normative power Europe" - or the normative influence that an attractive and dynamic EU used to have on applicant states such as Turkey. Helene Sjursen will be our discussant.

My own paper for the panel builds on the the research that I did for my book, and goes on to pontificate about the possible effects of the current Eurozone crisis for Turkey's membership bid. The panel will be the first research output from the Swedish Turkey Network that I am currently coordinating, since all the panelists are members of the network and the project got started thanks to it.