Our journey to the Centre for European Policy Studies began later in the day than any of our previous site visits, at 16:30. We were met with the vibrant personality of John Peterson. His contagious smile and quick remarks left us all ready to hear more.

Instead of just beginning with a spiel about himself, he asked to hear a little more about us. We each described our favorite part of the trip thus far. Answers ranged from all the various institutions we have visited to more broad responses. These broad answers touched on the cohesion of the European Union amidst great cultural diversity, and how our visits to the various institutions have lent themselves to analysis of the differing perspectives of different institutions.

Once we had gone around the table, it was time to hear from the experts. While MEP Richard Corbett was meant to be the one briefing us, he had important business that kept him in London. Understandable, especially since this is a bit of a tumultuous time for the United Kingdom. In a pinch, John Peterson was able to rally some of his colleagues to give us a fascinating view from the thinktank itself.
As we moved on to the perspective of the think-tank employees, the mood turned more somber. Our first presenter began discussing how he thinks the EU has failed to make drastic changes since he first moved to Brussels. He highlighted that a lot of this lack of progress stems from the locations of the various institutions, which is detailed in the treaties. For example, he described these red boxes in the Parliament building in Brussels that contain material that must be shipped to Strasbourg because of the incidence of there being two Parliament buildings.

We then moved to a more positive note with the talking points on the summit agenda coming up at the end of the month. The agenda includes Brexit, migration, the deepening of the banking union, and the probable accession of Albania and Macedonia. On the idea of Brexit, one of the students wanted to understand what exactly the exit of the United Kingdom will look like. The conclusion seems to be that no one truly knows. There will have be a transition period, due to the fact that Article 50 was triggered with no plans in order for an exit strategy. Overall, though, British citizens are surprised about how little Brussels today is concerned with Brexit. This is due to negotiations being extremely compartmentalized within the institutions.

Our next briefer was involved in the economic policy unit at CEPS and also happened to be from Italy. As there is quite a bit going on with the Italian government at the moment, it was interesting to hear about it from the perspective of an Italian citizen. The newly elected government is a coalition government that is sympathetic to Trump and Putin and has agreed on a loose fiscal policy, which will increase the country’s debt further. As of right now, Italy has a 130% debt in relation to their GDP and has experienced low growth since the Great Recession. Although the EU has already experienced a debt crisis with Greece, Greece accounts for approximately 1% of the EU economy, whereas Italy accounts for 12% to 13%. This crisis would be more disastrous to the European Union than any other. Due to this situation, the EU is justifying moving some of their budget to Southern European countries. This may also be a scheme to remove some of the funding from Hungary and Poland, where there is democratic backsliding.

To wrap our meeting up, we briefly touched on whether the Trump administration will drastically change the trajectory of the EU-US relationship. I think that while it may put a major stall on the process, it will not change the trajectory completely, but the next president will have major bridges to build.

After a fun night of dancing at Autoworld thanks to Jacob/Jack’s lovely host family and a beautiful weekend with our own individual host families, we were all refreshed and ready to go to the European Commission this morning.

The European Commission is the legislative body of the European Union. They are made up of 28 commissioners from each of the 28 member states. The current President is Junker from Luxembourg. We then went through security and took a group picture before going upstairs to our briefing room to first get informed by a representative of the Commission on the inner working of the European Union as well as a more detailed description of how the European Commission operates. Our speaker described an overall timeline of European Integration from the Schuman Declaration in 1950 to the establishment of the EEC in 1957 through all the enlargements and Treaties to bring us where we are today. The European Commission generates the ideas for proposals while the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament are the decision making bodies that approve the legislation. There are four main roles of the Commission that were described to us. Those being: right of initiative, policy and budget implementation, guardians of the treaty, and the international dimension. There are 20-30 proposals every year and there are also 10 key priorities of Junker’s Commission:

Our speaker then went on to describe these in more detail. He focused mostly on priorities one through six due to lack of time. When describing number one, increase in jobs and investment, I thought it was interesting that he stated Europeans would benefit from having a similar small business policy like we have in the United States. In regard to priority two, we learned that Europe still has many borders within the digital single market. There needs to be legislation to further integrate the telecom market and we were told to keep an eye on a new regulation coming up in November. For three through five his explanation was fairly straight forward. They highlight the need for a widening of EU integration in the fact that for priority three the commission can only give advice and allocate money from the budget towards climate change they unfortunate cannot enforce regulations. And for four and five to achieve a deeper and fairer market and union we need more agreed upon integration. Priority six was a good segway into a deeper conversation of trade policy as our speaker specialized in trade himself. He hit on defining topic such as the transition from a common market to a customs union, the four freedoms, the EU treaties, as well as standardization. One of the key issues that stood out to me was the problems that have arisen with the Free Movement of Workers. While this was initial brought to my attention as one of the core arguments of Pro-Brexit individuals, I was more struck when my host father brought up this problem at the dinner table one evening last week. He explained to us how his own individual company made up of Belgian engineers and architects was competing with workers from Poland and Romania that were offering to do the work for much less. This real life example helped put in perspective the EU legislation that we have been studying the past few days and I hope that the new legislation put in place two weeks ago will effectively be able to enforce a standardization across the EU.

After a quick coffee break we then heard from our next guest: Jan Vandenberghe. He played a key role in the TTIP negotiations and is a senior trade advisor as well as deals with U.S. Canada relations. He briefed us on the growing divergence between the U.S. and the E.U. ‘s trade policy, especially with the United States pulling out of the JCPOA and putting tariffs on EU products as of June 1^st of this year. We also spoke about the EU’s retaliatory tariffs specifically targeting Levi’s, Harley Davidsons, Tennessee Whiskey and American farmers that are going into effect later this week. It still remains to be seen if this statement will be effective but regardless it shows that Europe will not be pushed around by the United States. It was interesting to hear about Europe’s reaction to the United States pulling out of the Iran Deal, and how they will continue to do business in Iran especially the smaller companies that don’t have an easy way around the tariffs. Mr. Vandenberghe also spent time going over procurement funds and describe to us how the EU is working on gaining further access at the individual state level instead of federally because of how closed off the current administration has been with the US markets. The EU wants to improve on the public procurement front before further liberalizing their markets. All in all, we gain so much valuable information and much more detail into transatlantic trade relations.

We then ended today a little early and split off to get lunch in downtown Brussels. After that Angelica and I headed back to our host family quickly to watch the soccer matches of the day. The Red Devils (Belgium) played at 17h and the British played at 20h. Both teams won their matches and it has been really fun being able to watch how supportive the Belgian people are of their team here in Brussels. There are flags in windows, every pub plays the game and people paint their faces as well as wear jerseys and scarves. They have a great team this year; who knows they might even win the whole thing!

Throughout this study abroad, we have learned about and visited the important institutions of the European Union. Today, we took a different look at the European Union through the lense of a multinational corporation operating within it, Google. Clara Sommier welcomed us to Google Brussels and began our visit with an information session. She explained that she is a former employee of the European Parliament and part of her position at Google is advising members of the European Parliament on different technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), related to proposed legislation.

When we went to the European Youth Event in Strasbourg, we learned about Google’s Art and Culture project. This project, in part, focused on digitizing museums around the world so that people would be able to see important exhibits and learn about different cultures no matter what country they reside in. We were able to ask Clara more about this project during our visit. She explained that Google has partnered with multiple museums for this project but it was a difficult process to get the museums to agree to be a part of this project. Naturally, they are protective of their artifacts. I found this very interesting because museums are a celebration of culture and an important tool for everyone to learn about important historical events. I assumed that these museums would jump at the opportunity to share their exhibits with the world. Thankfully, this initial hesitation has subsided and Google has been able to add virtual tours of many museums on the Google Arts and Culture portal.

In addition to explaining the Google Arts and Culture project, Clara showed us a new program that Google created called Project X. This project is based on the nth degree of separation theory and allows you to choose two paintings and then based on the style and influences the algorithm detects in the paintings, it will then populate a line of similar paintings. This project is a great example of how modern technology can enhance the experience of viewing historical artifacts.

The later half of our discussion focused on Google’s response to the GDPR and the issue of demonetization of YouTube videos based on an algorithm. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was implemented on May 25th and Google and Facebook were among the first companies to be hit with lawsuits following its implementation. The lawsuit claimed that Google did not take enough measures to comply with the GDPR. Despite this lawsuit, we were assured that Google is working hard to comply with the GDPR and all of its required stipulations. Google is the parent company of YouTube and because of this, Clara was asked about Google’s thoughts on the demonization of YouTube videos. She explained to us that an algorithm decides on where an ad is placed based on a set of selections that YouTube creators select and that the advertisers select. She acknowledges that the algorithm is not perfect but that it can only continue to be improved to solve this problem as it learns through its machine learning capabilities.

The intersection of technology and the European Union was a very interesting topic to learn about because we traditionally think of these organizations as strictly bureaucratic when in reality, they are advised by multinational corporations on a variety of issues to make sure that they make the most informed decision possible on a piece of legislation involving technology.

After our visit to Google, we ended the day with a visit to Maison Antoine for some fries before starting our first weekend in Brussels!

At 9:45 A.M., we met underneath the Simone Veil dedication in front of the European Parliament. A warm and beautiful day in front of us, we walked into the building ready to learn about the European Parliament and the trade relationship between the European Union and other states.

We were guided to a briefing room and had the pleasure of being briefed by Laura Puccio, who has an extensive career in European Union trade law. With years of training and education behind her, Ms. Puccio was able to inform and answer all our questions as well as provide insight into new topics. Her main focuses are on Brexit and the European Union-United States relationship. With the election of the Donald Trump, it seems that the European Union has lost a strong ally. It has brought forth an era of uncertainty and confusion, especially with trade.

Ms. Puccio then proceeded to explain the World Trade Organizations three measures that are considered exemptions for applying tariffs to all trading partners. The first is anti-dumping, which is if a company exports a product at a price lower than the price it normally charges on its own home market, it is said to be “dumping” the product. The next measure is countervailing measures. This agreement does two things: it disciplines the use of subsidies, and it regulates the actions countries can take to counter the effects of subsidies. Finally, there are safeguards. A WTO member may restrict imports of a product temporarily if its domestic industry is injured or threatened with an injury caused by a surge in imports.

Donald Trump has placed tariffs on products such as steel and aluminum. This hurts the European Union significantly as this negatively impacts there domestic producers. It makes it far too expensive to ship, which decreases exports and profit significantly.

The EU has notified to the WTO a list of US products on which the EU may in the future apply extra import duties. This would be to compensate in an equivalent manner for the impact of the US tariff measures on steel and aluminum, which the EU considers to be safeguard measures in effect, should they enter into force.

With this information in mind, my classmates asked important questions. For example, whether or not the European Union has placed safeguard measures on products that would specifically target middle America. According to Ms. Puccio, the tariffs are clearly a bit politicized and while it is not explicitly stated, it is incredibly hard to not recognized the purpose of those tariffs.

After an incredible briefing, we got to enjoy a delicious lunch at the café in the House of European History. Where we also had to say goodbye to Dr. Markley, but fortunately she is rejoining us soon!

The museum itself was interesting and intricate. We were given tablets that were interactive. Every time we would walk into a new part of the museum, we were able to listen to different parts of history that went along with it.

For example, we started off learning about Europe in the 19th century. We further explored Europe’s history in terms of Slave Trade, both World Wars, and the creation of the European Union. One of the areas that really stood out to me was the information about the Slave Trade. We don’t really focus on that aspect of European history, so to have some insight about it was really important to me. We saw blueprints that showed how slaves were crammed into ships and were transported to be sold.

The most interactive part of the museum was the comparison of Western Europe to the Soviet Union and their republics. There was a table where you could use your tablets and compare the GDP of Denmark to the GDP of the Soviet Union. You could also compare the infant mortality, education and amount of cars per person. It was interesting to see the comparisons of the different parts of the world. Similarly, there was another table where you could vote on the lives of people and which one you preferred. For example, there were two 20-year olds who were deciding about school. The main difference was where they lived. One lived in France and the other lived in Latvia. They had different outcomes once they finished school, and another dichotomy was demonstrated between the West and East.

My favorite part of the museum was the final floor. There was a wall dedicated to quotes from visitors of the museum. The words on the wall ranged from support of the European Union to calls for gender equality. It truly showed how united the European Union is, especially in divisive times like these.