Bonjour! My name is Emma Smith and I am a Masters student in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. This summer, I am travelling with Dr. Vicki Birchfield and 18 undergraduate students on the European Union and Transatlantic Relations Study Abroad program! I participated in the program as an undergraduate in 2015, and I’m very excited to be back in Europe as a teaching assistant and graduate student.

My first day in Brussels, 2015.

We arrived in Europe a week or so ago, on Monday, May 15^th. For the first month of the program, we’ll be staying at Georgia Tech’s campus in Metz, France, called Georgia Tech Lorraine. Since we arrived, it’s been a whirlwind of activity getting to know a new campus in a new country on a new continent!

Aside from getting settled in our residence and trying not to get lost on the Metz bus system, we’ve also been learning a lot about this city and region. On Tuesday, we took a train tour of the city and saw many of the major Metz landmarks. We’ve also taken a walking tour of Metz’s beautiful cathedral and visited the Centre Pompidou Metz.

Attempting to navigate Metz public transit, 2017.

On Friday morning, we visited Fort Queuleu, a site important to the history of Franco-German rivalry. The fort was built just before the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and changed hands along with the rest of the Moselle department several times until the end of World War II. During World War II, the Fort was used as a holding point for French Resistance fighters. We heard from our tour guide, Pascal, about the brutal treatment these prisoners experienced at the hands of the Nazis. On Friday afternoon, we learned more about the history of Alsace-Lorraine and the Franco-Prussian War at the Gravelotte Museum. These tours put the importance of the Alsace-Lorraine region to European politics into perspective. What is now peaceful French countryside near an open border into Germany was once the heart of a bitter rivalry that caused three wars within a century.

In the classroom this week, Dr. Birchfield introduced the class to the European Union as she views it and laid the foundation for what we’ll learn this summer. As I learned two years ago, Dr. Birchfield views the European Union a peace project. The idea of an ever-closer union has helped to sustain peace in a region previously plagued by power politics and bloody wars. However, not everyone sees the European Union this way.

Two years ago, Brexit seemed an unlikely and distant possibility. Since I last participated in the EU program, populist movements throughout Europe and the United States have rapidly gained ground. Resentment towards the bureaucracy of the European Union and the divide between Northern Europe and Southern Europe have only grown. While Europe faces many new challenges since the last time I was here, there are also many reasons for optimism. The European project will always face difficulties as European leaders try to navigate a changing world, so revisiting what I learned two years ago in a new context and with the knowledge I’ve gained since then will hopefully offer new insights on the fate of the European Union.

Today we all returned from our long weekends feeling refreshed and ready to jump back into learning about the EU and transatlantic relations. It’s pretty hot in Metz right now (mid to upper 90s!), and since air conditioning is more of a luxury in Europe than in the US, I think we were all relieved to be spending the day inside the nicely air conditioned classroom.

Since the NATO and G7 summits had been held this past weekend, it was fitting that we started off class by watching a virtual briefing on Trump’s foreign policy and transatlantic relations after his first 100 days (which you can watch here) before seeing if any of the things mentioned came up this weekend. The members of the panel, including Dr. Young from Tech, also talked a bit about Brexit, so that factored into some our our discussion too, especially on the EU side.

Of course, during our discussion of the positives and negatives that came out of the summits, we couldn’t help talking about this incident:

We also talked about what some of the possible implications are of what was said during the summit—like Trump being the first president not to explicitly state US support for Article V, his meetings with both the Belgian and French leaders, the call for members to meet the 2% GDP spending, and the possibility that the United States will pull out of the Paris Climate Accord.

There were also multiple questions asked today that we will be keeping in mind during our trip. The first: To what extent are the EU and US diverging, and what are the consequences of such divergence? We heard this weekend that Angela Merkel essentially said Europe could no longer rely on the United States, which certainly hints at a divergence—especially if the US ultimately decides to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord as well. We’ll have to see what else happens before coming up with an answer by the end of the summer, and I’m sure this question will come up again during the EU-US relations simulation we’ll be doing later.

The second question was difficult to answer, and I actually didn’t even give an answer when Emma asked the class: Do you think Brexit and Trump will be a good thing for the EU? It’s hard to say because there are both positives and negatives that have arisen since each event in the EU context. Of course more support for the EU from the European people is a good thing, but I’m not sure having two difficult allies and losing an important member state will be. It will certainly be something I think about as the summer continues, especially during our time in Brussels and with the U.K. General Election happening on June 8th.

The last thing we did in class today was have a mini lecture on EU foreign and defense policies, learning more about the European External Action Service (kind of like the State Department of the EU) and the Common Security and Defense Policy. First, we identified the resources that the EU has, like member states that are medium sized and nuclear powers, have seats on the UN Security Council, and collective defense and soft power. We also identified some obstacles, like disagreements or different national interests that make it hard for the EU to form one foreign or defense policy. In particular, we learned about how the CSDP in particular works in relation to NATO and discussed the possibility of there ever being a European Army after what took place at the NATO summit.

Finally, we took a break from discussing the future of the world to watch a film discussing an issue that is still very real in America: racism. The film was called “I Am Not Your Negro” and it used the writings of James Baldwin to discuss the Civil Rights Movement in America and some of the movement’s key figures. However, it was made even more powerful by incorporating footage and drawing comparisons with what is still happening in America today, like Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. Overall, the film was really well done (a bunch of us cried), and it was very eye-opening as well.

Starting off our second week in Metz, we had two lectures on Monday and Tuesday at GT Lorraine. Our first lecture kicked off with a discussion of the Treaty of Nice, or the treaty of abysmal power grabbing, as Dr. Birchfield said. The entire class had a good laugh when Dr. B told us about the time she unknowingly spoke to a diplomat who worked on the Treaty of Nice, and told him directly how awful she thought it was… We then moved the discussion to a new topic of another possible “failure” of the European Union, the Convention on the Future of Europe and the unsuccessful Constitutional Treaty. Most member states of the EU voted in favor of the treaty in national referendums, but France and the Netherlands both voted it down. The rejection by the French and Dutch people was devastating to the Constitutional Treaty, and so the process concluded. The last topic we learned on Monday was the EU institutions. This discussion took up the majority of our time, since we spent time learning the components and functions of each of the primary institutions, the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of the EU, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice, and the European External Action Service. It took us a while to sort out which institution was the European Council and which one was the Council of the EU, because the names are so similar and we weren’t sure which one Dr. B meant when she said, “the Council” (honestly, I still don’t know which institution she was referring to). But by the end of the day, we were very familiar with the workings of the EU.

Primary institutions of the European Union

The founders of the European Coal and Steel Community, or the original 6 EU members.

Lecture on Tuesday was the day before our member state presentations, and since there wasn’t enough of us to cover all 28 members, Dr. B presented on the original 6, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. We started with and spent most of our time on France, since this is the country where we will spend 5 out of 10 weeks on our program. Dr. B started off with a discussion of French culture, encompassing everything from food to national symbols. Following culture, we talked about French politics, which was just recently the highlight of international news, with the pivotal runoff election between Marine le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. After France, we also put a lot of focus on Germany, another one of the most influential EU member states. Like our discussion on France, we started with culture and the moved to politics. Germany also has the attention of an international audience because of their upcoming elections in September. The elections in Germany have less pressure than the French elections, with Marine le Pen set on holding a Frexit referendum, since the two top German candidates Angela Merkel (currently in office) and Martin Schulz are both in favor of remaining in the EU, but it is an important election nevertheless. Following the same general structure of discussion, we spent the rest of Tuesday’s lecture on Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Luxembourg, and how their culture and politics are important to the prominence and integrity of the EU. We all left GTL excited to present and share our member states with the rest of the class on Wednesday.

The first GTL2000 lecture was given by Dr. Birchfield and covered some of the information our class already knew. She restated her fundamental belief that the EU is a peace project and kept the lecture engaging by opening up questions to the audience. One of these questions asked what people thought were the requirements for a country to join the EU (our class knew the answer of course). Some correct guesses were about the economies and democracies, but one interesting guess was that the country had to be in Europe. Surprisingly, this is not true, and this led to an interesting discussion. Instead, the third and final requirement is that the countries have to be able to adapt to everything else already in place.

I really enjoyed this lecture because it served as a review for things we already knew, and it was stimulating because it hit the highlights of the EU. Dr. Birchfield had a slide giving statistics on how two-thirds of people surveyed feel that they are citizens of the EU and some other powerful statistics to fully back up the claim the the EU is a peace project, even though some people have realist or Euroskeptic viewpoints. She also talked about Lafayette and how he was a hero of both the American and French Revolutions, and she brought up the notion of what it means to be willing to spill your blood for an idea.

Dr. Birchfield also included an anecdote about asking previous students to try to find positive media coverage of the EU for extra credit (which they could never do), and this transitioned into an explanation of the irony of Brexit and how it has impacted people’s perceptions of the EU. Now people are more educated on what the EU actually is (as proven by the most popular Google search following Brexit), and opinions regarding the EU are more positive. Although people may still have mixed opinions, it is important avoid using a “single story” on which to base judgements, as pulled from Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” I think my favorite thing I took from Dr. Birchfield’s lecture is that even when we are already educated on the EU, there is always more to learn and understand about how and why it functions, and what that means in the greater context.

The second GTL2000 lecture was given by Sonia Serafin on the culture of France. She gave an overview of some things France is famous for and kept it exciting by including pictures and videos. A memorable one of those video clips showed fireworks surrounding the Eiffel Tower which was quite an impressive display. She went over some famous drinks, musicians, etc. from France and even touched on cultural differences between France and the US by showing us the Google results from typing in “snail” versus “escargot.” I think the most interesting part of her lecture was when she talked about how French people are very proud of their country because this is even visible in my everyday life here in Metz. I’ve noticed this displayed in things like the pronunciation of “Metz,” the reappearing symbol of “RF,” and even the way French people speak about their country compared to others. I think it was nice to get an overview of France in a lecture while also being able to go out and explore this country on our own.