The EU-Eastern Partnership Countries: Association Agreements and Transdisciplinarity in Studies, Training and Research

Abstract

The European Union (EU) signed Association Agreements on 27 June 2014 with Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine. The Association Agreement (AA) is the EU’s main instrument to bring the countries in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) closer to EU standards and norms. For the citizens of the EaP countries to benefit from these agreements, a more in-depth knowledge of the EU and the EU Member States is required to be reflected in a comparative approach to European Union studies. We examine these implications on the need to expand and adapt, the content and approach to research and teaching European Union studies, with the transdisciplinary approach becoming increasingly dominant, becoming a modern tool for research in social sciences. This contribution aims to offer insight into the implementation of transdisciplinarity in the methodology of education and research as it is determined by current increasing global challenges. This approach should serve as a means of integrating a number of main goals as part of learning, teaching and research processes: strengthening employability of young people and preparing them for citizenship. We discuss the need for modernizing European studies in the EU Member States that could serve as an example for the EU Eastern Partnership countries. We conclude that the theoretical approach to European and related studies of other disciplines and their practical implications should always be transdisciplinary in nature and benefit from direct in-situ exposure and should be fully integrated in university curricula

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“…In European institutions, the Azerbaijan government is famous for an avalanche of gross violations of the human rights and international law principles concerning the EU, lack of transparency in governance, and corruption scandals. 13 The country cannot economically integrate into the EU's single market through DCFTA offered in the Eastern Partnership program without being a member of the WTO (Muravska and Berlin 2014). Thus, from time to time the Azerbaijan government was subject to active criticism by the EU institutions.…”

University–Industry Interaction Trends in the Baltic Sea Region: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The potential of the developed economies of Scandinavia and Germany can serve as a driver for strengthening the collaboration between universities and business in the Baltic countries and Poland. A substantial role is given to strengthening the cooperation network between science, business and government, as well as to developing the Triple Helix (Etzkowitz, 2003), in which all three institutional spheres-universities, business and governmentstill retain their traditional mission but begin to play a new role, fulfilling the functions of other institutional spheres, with the university serving with an increasing frequency as an influential and equal partner in the Triple Helix (Etzkowitz, 2011;Muravska & Prause, 2012). New initiatives arising from these networks become a source of innovation policies at national, sub-national and supranational levels (Etzkowitz, 2003).…”

“…In the process of interaction with business, university shifts to the "third mission" (Mowery & Sampat, 2005), where, being business-oriented, it contributes to the creation of new enterprises, transfer of technologies and commercialisation (Alcaraz-Rodriguez et al, 2014;Muravska et al, 2012;Säär & Rull, 2015). University plays an important role as the source and the disseminator of new knowledge and technologies that meet the requirements of a modern economy and it can also play a more active role in the field of innovation in an increasingly knowledge-based society (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000).…”