EU trade and investment in historic and contemporary perspective

The course was tailored, in the first place, to meet the interest of a group of political science and economics university teachers from India and China.          Its overarching theme and subthemes were defined in an exchange during a one-day course on the EU (for which the participants were asked beforehand to outline their expectations) in the autumn of 2018, and in a similar but shorter deliberation in mid-2019 with professors and post graduates from China; on both occasions there were follow up consultations with participants, which also helped fine-tune its content.

The ultimate academic objective of the Course is to lay the foundations of a fully-fledged university programme; with this intention, the Course includes a review of and navigation in the statistics, indexes for international comparison and sources relevant to the respective Unit themes.
The very nature of the course themes makes it possible to both have different interpretations of the statistics and encourage the students to produce such interpretations. Based on the "Prompts" suggested after each closed-ended question from the course discussions, debates, seminars or workshops can be organised in class to provide opportunities for students to explore further the suggested sources and debate the ideas and conclusions they have reached as a result of their independent work.    

Last but not least, it is important to bear in mind that some of the trade and investment related themes of the course are likely to require updates in the near future.