About CEI @ UCC

The Centre for European Integration (CEI) at UCC (CEI @UCC) provides a platform for research in EU law, business, politics and societies. Its initial research programme relates to renewing European integration through citizens’ rights. The core argument is that the EU – in contrast to other international organisations – guarantees rights enforceable in national law. The EU thus only succeeds if citizens can be confident that rights guaranteed have substance and are enforced efficiently. Next to the EU itself, CEI@UCC also researches EU derived rights in its Western and Eastern neighbourhood (the UK and Ukraine) and its global relations, presently with a focus on China.

Present research continues to portray the Union’s main purpose as managing state interdependence, and on contest between Member States and the Union around competences. However, the EU does not merely serve states. Instead, it constitutes a “new stage in the process of creating an ever-closer union among the peoples in Europe”, and is also dedicated to taking decisions “as closely as possible to the citizens” (Article 1 TEU). Ultimately the EU’s success as a community of law hinges on citizens’ confidence that there is substance to rights under EU law, and that this substance is efficiently protected by the Union and its Member States.

CEI @ UCC creates a creative research environment with a basis in the School of Law, and affiliates across UCC. Its innovative research programme “Renewing EU Integration through Rights” stresses the need to reconnect the EU to all its citizens through realising substantive rights. Second, it engages in socio-legal research in order to establish the preconditions of realising rights in Europe’s multilevel polity, economy, and society.

Research Clusters

CEI @ UCC research is organised around four thematic clusters:

1. Safeguarding substantive rights for EU citizens, with a focus on inclusion and participation in European societies, ensuring substantive guarantees and effective enforcement of economic and social rights, as well as equality and non-discrimination rights for EU citizens and other residents of the EU
2. Ensuring and enabling transnational business and civic interaction through EU (derived) rights and their effective enforcement
3. Addressing the impact of geographical positions of citizens on the substantive enjoyment of the proceeds of EU integration, and devising measures addressing the disadvantages deriving from peripheral locations at the Eastern, Southern or Western fringes of the EU
4. Researching the scope for integration through rights in Europe and the world on the basis of EU neighbourhood and global partnership agreements, including in the context of the new relationship between the EU and the UK and the position of Ireland towards the EU after the UK has left the Union