European Union - Reforms - Hungarian interests. What kind of European Union would we like?

The lecture deals with broad topics. First, it addresses some questions related to the current state of the EU integration regarding institutions and common policies. Second, it discusses the continued importance, the main results and hindering factors related to the Lisbon Programme, with a special emphasis on the educational system in Europe and Hungary. Third, the lecture deals with some possibilities in changing the EU’s rather limited external relation models to more flexible instruments

Social representations and the politics of participation

Recent work has called for the integration of different perspectives into the field of political psychology (Haste, 2012). This chapter suggests that one possible direction that such efforts can take is studying the role that social representations theory (SRT) can play in understanding political participation and social change. Social representations are systems of common-sense knowledge and social practice; they provide the lens through which to view and create social and political realities, mediate people's relations with these sociopolitical worlds and defend cultural and political identities. Social representations are therefore key for conceptualising participation as the activity that locates individuals and social groups in their sociopolitical world. Political participation is generally seen as conditional to membership of sociopolitical groups and therefore is often linked to citizenship. To be a citizen of a society or a member of any social group one has to participate as such. Often political participation is defined as the ability to communicate one's views to the political elite or to the political establishment (Uhlaner, 2001), or simply explicit involvement in politics and electoral processes (Milbrath, 1965). However, following scholars on ideology (Eagleton, 1991; Thompson, 1990) and social knowledge (Jovchelovitch, 2007), we extend our understanding of political participation to all social relations and also develop a more agentic model where individuals and groups construct, develop and resist their own views, ideas and beliefs. We thus adopt a broader approach to participation in comparison to other political-psychological approaches, such as personality approaches (e.g. Mondak and Halperin, 2008) and cognitive approaches or, more recently, neuropsychological approaches (Hatemi and McDermott, 2012). We move away from a focus on the individual's political behaviour and its antecedents and outline an approach that focuses on the interaction between psychological and political phenomena (Deutsch and Kinnvall, 2002) through examining the politics of social knowledge

European integration by daylight

It has become common to highlight the desirability of a more 'politicised' European Union (EU) so as to counter the low visibility of its policymaking and the disaffection this may breed. Endorsing this view, the article argues existing contributions to the topic tend to give insufficient attention to the relationship between institutional settings and everyday life, and to underplay the significance of how political actors interpret and reproduce the social and political world. The article explores how one might reconsider these questions, drawing on some of the insights of cultural and pragmatic sociology to suggest that the important obstacles to further politicisation may be rooted in contemporary political culture. A contribution is thereby intended both to the topic in question and to a wider effort to supplement institutional perspectives in EU studies with those drawn from sociology