Parliamentary Voices on the Future of Europe

Since 2007, Gabriele Abels is Professor for comparative politics and European integration at the University of Tübingen. She holds a Jean Monnet Chair since 2011 and is Director of the the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence PRRIDE since 2015. From 2012 to 2015 she was chairwoman of the German political science association (DVPW). She was visiting fellow at the University of Osnabrück, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Missouri-St.Louis, USA, St. Petersburg University, Russia, and Harvard University, USA.

Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka is assistant professor at the University of Wrocław and visiting fellow at Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) of the Sorbonne University.

Her research interests focus on the EU democratic deficit, EU institutional reform and the role of parliaments in EU governance. Her works appeared, among others, in the European Political Science Review, The Journal of Legislative Studies or the Polish Political Science Review.  She lectured and conducted research at the European University Institute in Florence, Deusto University in Bilbao, Masaryk University in Brno and Sciences Po in Paris. She currently carries out her own research project entitled: “National parliaments as ‘multi-arena players’ in the EU?” financed by the Polish National Science Centre.

Dr. Elisabeth Donat is a research associate and deputy head of the Department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy at Danube-University Krems. She previously worked as a research associate at the University of Salzburg, Innsbruck and Vienna in their respective institutes of sociology. She has conducted extensive trainings in methodology (qualitative and quantitative) that complete her portfolio. She has passed on her knowledge in more than 50 courses at the aforementioned universities and other colleges. As a research associate within the REGIOPARL project, she is responsible for the conception and execution of surveys with deputies of regional parliaments as well as the evaluation of their responses.

Eugen Freund is a former Austrian politician (Social Democratic Party) who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2014 until 2019. Freund had initially joined the country’s state broadcaster, ORF, in 1974. He then served as press secretary of the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs and as press officer of the Austrian Information Service in New York between 1978 and 1984. He rejoined ORF in 1986 and, among other posts, was Washington correspondent and then presenter of the main evening news show until his retirement at the end of 2013.

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Guérot is the director of the Department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy at Danube-University Krems and is initator of the REGIOPARL research project. Ulrike Guérot worked, amongst others, in leading positions for different European think tanks and taught at universities in both Europe and the United States. She is the founder of the European Democracy Lab in Berlin, which attempts to develop innovative ideas for Europe.

Karl-Heinz Lambertz studied law in Belgium and Germany. He was Minister as of 1990 and later Minister-President of the German-speaking Community of Belgium from 1999 to 2014. Until September 2016, he held the function of President of the Parliament. From Then, Mr. Lambertz represented the German-speaking Community in the Belgian Senate. After the last elections, he became President of the Parliament a second time. In this quarter of a century, Karl-Heinz Lambertz has become a renowned expert for cross-border cooperation that constitutes a crucial topic for the smallest Belgian entity on both a bilateral level as well as in the framework of Euregio Meuse-Rhine and the Saarlorlux Euroregion.

On the European level, Karl-Heinz Lambertz is member of the Committee of the Regions (CoR) since 2001 and held the positon of its First Vice-President from February 2015 to July 2017. On July, 12^th 2017, he was elected President of the CoR for two and a half years. Currently, he is still member of the bureau. He is also member of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe since 2000 and its Vice-President since October 2016. From 2010 to 2017 and from 2020, he was President of the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR).

Andreas Maurer is Professor for Political Science and European Integration at the University of Innsbruck. Since 2011 he is a member of the advisory board of the Observatory of Parliaments after the Lisbon Treaty (OPAL). From 2007 – 2011, he worked in the Secretariate of the Committee on International Trade (INTA) for the European Parliament. Among other things, he also was Detached National Expert to the European Parliament (Secretariat of the Committee for International Trade), Adviser to the European Constitutional Convention, and is member of the Academic Board of the Institut for European Politics in Berlin.

Eric Miklin is Associate Professor of Austrian Politics in Comparative European Perspective in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Salzburg. Miklin holds a Doctorate from the University of Vienna, Austria (2008). In addition, he was a scholarship recipient/junior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna from 2004-2008, where he completed the post-graduate program ‘European Integration’. Prior to joining the University of Salzburg, Eric Miklin was Postdoc Fellow at the Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he was engaged in the integrated research project ‘Reconstituting Democracy in Europe’ (www.reconproject.eu) from 2008 to 2010. His recent publications and conference presentations focus on the comparative analysis of EU-related policy-processes in Austria and other member states and especially on the role of (national) parliaments and parties in this regard.