Since 2005, UACES has honoured individuals who have made a substantial contribution to development or knowledge in the area of European Studies.
The 2011 winner, Wolfgang Wessels was presented with his award at the UACES Annual Conference in Cambridge 2011.
Dave Allen, Wolfgang Wessels & Geoffrey Edwards
“He has made countless and repeated contributions to the study of European integration – always with great dedication and deep commitment. He has set a fine example of just how much an academic career can achieve and his numerous students and colleagues have benefited enormously from his dedication to and continuing enthusiasm for European studies.”
Dame Helen Wallace
Further testimonials are available to read in Issue 69 of UACES News.
UACES was delighted to be able to honour Mike Smith as the winner of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Bruges, Belgium, 2010.
Mike Smith and Richard Whitman
“It comes as no surprise that Mike Smith is receiving this honour. A leading scholar and teacher of European integration studies since the 1970s, his grasp of theory and practice has long graced and informed the literature and scholarly conferences; his books, monographs, and articles on EU-US relations are second to none for their depth of insight and clarity of prose; and his leadership of European studies in the UK - and steadfast support for EU studies in America - are among Mike’s most important legacies. All said, you will find no kinder, more gentle, and more collegial member of our community.”
Professor Roy H. Ginsberg, Skidmore College
Further testimonials from former colleagues and students of Mike Smith are available to read in Issue 65 of UACES News.
UACES was delighted to be able to honour Beate Kohler-Koch as the winner of the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Angers, France, 2009.
Beate Kohler-Koch
Beate Kohler-Koch is Emeritus Professor and former Chair for International Relations and European Affairs at the University of Mannheim. She is project director at the MZES, Mannheim University and since 2008 has been ‘Bremen Distinguished Professor’ at the Bremen International Graduate School of the Social Sciences (BIGSSS). Professor Kohler-Koch was chairwoman of the German Political Science Association, the IPSA Research Committee on European Unification and the German Association of European Studies. She was invited as visiting professor to several universities at home and abroad, and is currently honorary professor at Nankai University, China and doctor honoris causa of Oslo University. She is member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften. She initiated and coordinated a large national research programme (1996 - 2005) on ‘Governance in the EU’, as well as the EU-funded Network of Excellence CONNEX on ‘Efficient and Democratic Governance in a Multi-Level Europe’ (2004-2008). In a very rich research career, this leading Professor has produced many important publications which have shaped the European Studies research agenda across a wide range of topics. In recent year her research has concentrated on the transformation of governance at both EU and national level, and also on the contribution of civil society to EU democracy. It is perhaps in these areas that her contributions to the field have been most widely studied, cited and enjoyed. Her most recent publications can be viewed at www.kohler-koch.de.
An award for 'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary European Studies' was presented to Professor Alan Milward, Professor Emeritus of Economic History, London School of Economics. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Edinburgh, UK, 2008.
Frances Lynch, collecting the award on behalf of her husband, from Stephen Wall
Perhaps the leading EU historian, Alan S. Milward’s career has culminated as Professor Emeritus at the European University Institute, Florence and Official Historian of Her Majesty's Government after a glittering career. His many publications include at least two landmark books in European studies, The Frontier of National Sovereignty and, perhaps most famously, The European Rescue of the Nation State. His published works while at the Cabinet Office included volume one of UK Accession to the European Communities and he was working on volumes 2 and 3 when he had to resign from his post due to ill health. Professor Milward has been a devoted inter-disciplinary scholar determined to bring history and the social sciences together.
The UACES Practitioner Prize is awarded on occasion to a practitioner of EU affairs who, in the judgement of the jury, has made an outstanding contribution to the development of the EU and its policies or law.
Alex Warleigh-Lack, David Edward and John Kerr
The prize was awarded in 2008 to Rt Hon Professor Sir David Edward, KCMG, GC, LLD, DHC, FRSE, Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh. An influential judge on both the Court of First Instance (1989-92) and then the European Court of Justice (1992-2004), Prof Sir David has been influential not only in developing the jurisprudence and law of the EU, but in explaining and evaluating the role of the Courts to a range of audiences via means such as his books, engagement with students, and his oral history site at the University of Denver. He has a distinguished career as both a practitioner and an academic, and is Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh.
An award for 'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary European Studies' was presented to Professor William Paterson OBE, AcSS, FRSE, FRSA, Bundesverdienstkreuz, University of Birmingham. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Portsmouth, UK, 2007.
William Paterson flanked by Alex Warleigh-Lack & John Kerr
Professor William Paterson began his academic career as a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen and later moved to the University of Warwick as a Volkswagen Lecturer where, after a number of years, he was promoted to a Professorship in Politics. In 1990 Prof. Paterson returned to Scotland and to the University of Edinburgh where he was appointed Salvesen Professor of European Institutions and Director of its Europa Institute. He served on the UACES Committee and was Chair of UACES from 1989-1994 and co founded the Association for the Study of German Politics in 1974.
In 1994 Professor Paterson came south to Birmingham to direct the Institute for German Studies. Under his leadership, the Institute has developed into a dedicated centre of research excellence, with a thriving postgraduate community, which makes a major contribution to British-German relations and policy debates.
Professor Paterson has written or edited over twenty books and a large number of academic papers on European and German issues; he was a founding co-editor of German Politics (1992-2002) and has been co-editor of JCMS since 2003. He is a Director of the Königswinter Conference (a series of annual bilateral British-German conferences which has been meeting since 1950) and a member of the Advisory Council (Beirat) of the Humboldt University's Centre for British Studies. In March 2005, Professor Paterson was appointed Chairman of the German-British Forum in succession to Lord Hurd of Westwell. He also served as Chair of 'The One Europe or Several?' ESRC Programme in succession to Lord Dahrendorf (2001-2003). This was a programme which had been initiated by him during his period on the ESRC Research Priorities Board(1995-1999).
In recognition of his ‘outstanding contribution to British-German relations’, Professor Paterson was awarded the German Order of Merit in March 1999. In June 1999 he was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for ‘scholarship in German studies’.
Awards for 'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary European Studies' were presented to Professor Helen Wallace, CMG, FBA, Director of the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute and to Lord Wallace of Saltaire (William Wallace), Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords and lately Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Limerick, Ireland, 2006.
At the conference dinner, the UACES 2006 Lifetime Award for contribution to European Studies was made to Professor Helen Wallace, CMG, recently retired from the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute and Lord William Wallace of Saltaire, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson on International Affairs in the House of Lords, and recently retired from a Chair at the London School of Economics.
William Wallace with John Kerr
Significantly for UACES, William Wallace is a former editor of JCMS and a long-standing contributor to the activities of UACES, having been Editor at JCMS (and in this role instrumental in giving UACES an ownership stake in JCMS which has secured UACES’ financial stability for many years). He has held posts at Manchester, Oxford (St Antony’s College) (1990-95) and elsewhere. From 1994-97 he was concurrently Professor of International Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. William Wallace has been one of the leading authorities in the UK on the politics of European integration, the changing political landscape of Europe, and the UK’s European relations. He has been a leading International Relations-based theorist of European integration who successfully intervened to help reverse, through the publication of a range of seminal articles, a trend in which the weight of the EU integration theory literature seemed to be shifting irreversibly to the other side of Atlantic. He is recognised as a leading intellectual and commentator on the EU in a global setting, particularly regarding EU relations with near-neighbours. Singly and in combination, not least with Helen Wallace, he has an extensive list of publications in these areas. Most recently, he has contributed effectively to shaping the domestic and EU-wide policy and constitutional debates via his role in House of Lords, where he has sought to improve the level of parliamentary debates on the EU.
William Wallace has been a devoted and much admired teacher. He has supervised the theses of countless students, many of whom went on to pursue successful academic (and political) careers (e.g. Olli Rehn, now a European Commissioner, and Alexander Stubb MEP). Both he and Helen have also taught students about the EU in other contexts: e.g. Andrew Moravcsik and Jose-Manuel Barroso. William was Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, 1978-90, the longest serving Director of Studies aside from Arnold Toynbee 1929-1956. He is generally held to have been very successful in this role, and he has remained closely involved in Chatham House activities since then.
Helen Wallace
Professor Helen Wallace has had a very distinguished career in European Studies, spanning many institutions and several countries. She has been a great servant to UACES, having been Secretary and Chair during the 1970s. She was Lecturer in European Studies, UMIST/Manchester, between 1974 and 1978, and Lecturer in Administration, Civil Service College, from 1978 to 1985, from where she was seconded to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Planning Staff in 1979-80. During this time she initiated and designed a number of simulation exercises on Council negotiations, first for use in Civil Service College courses, then as an annual exercise at the College of Bruges where she was a Visiting Professor for 25 years, between 1976 and 2001. These exercises have been very widely used in courses across Europe, and are on topics as esoteric and diverse as dentists’ drills and horsemeat. Helen Wallace was the first Head of (what was then called) West Europe Programme at Chatham House from 1985 to 1992. This was far and away the most active (and successful) period of Chatham House’s coverage of Europe. She then moved to become the (first) Director of the (refounded) Sussex European Institute between 1992 and 2001, before a final move to become Director of the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Florence between 2001 and 2006. In and amongst she found time to be the designer and director of the ESRC Research Programme, ‘One Europe or Several?’, which ran between 1998 and 2002 which gave much encouragement to younger researchers in the field, and brought scholars from many disciplines together in different projects as well as within the whole programme, and to be on the European Commission’s advisory group for the 5th and 6th Framework programmes for European research. Throughout this time, with her academic work, Helen Wallace contributed to the strengthening of European studies as a discipline, through the publication of many books and articles, effectively inaugurating the study of the domestication of European affairs, that is, the sub-discipline which has come to be known as ‘Europeanisation’, and lately contributing massively to the study of enlargement and diversity within the EU. Her book, with William and others, Policy-Making in the European Union, is now in its 5th edition and is an established point of reference for scholars studying the EU. Throughout her career, Helen Wallace has been an institution-builder, par excellence, leaving a massive legacy wherever she has been.
It has been important to UACES to honour Helen and William Wallace both separately, and together. Wherever they have worked, and wherever they have gone to speak or teach or write, Helen and William Wallace have been consistently generous with their time and support for other scholars, especially younger scholars, and in particular, and as a crucial expression of their ‘human interest’, both have always remained interested in the ‘whole person’. Scholars may be scholars, but they are also people.
In recognition of her particular 'Contribution to European Studies on the island of Ireland', an award was presented to Professor Elizabeth Meehan of Queen's University Belfast. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Limerick, Ireland, 2006.
Elizabeth Meehan
At the first session of the Conference, we made a special award for her lifetime contribution to European Studies on the island of Ireland to Professor Emerita Elizabeth Meehan, who has recently retired as the founding Director of the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research at Queen’s University Belfast. Elizabeth Meehan began her career in the Diplomatic Service, taking leave to complete a doctoral thesis at Nuffield College Oxford on employment equality for women. Within twelve years, when she accepted a chair at Queen’s University Belfast, she became the first female professor of politics in the UK in 1991. Professor Meehan’s work on European citizenship was groundbreaking and timely in the early 1990s and its recent updating shows that she is still a leading figure in this area. Similarly, her work on multilevel governance was among the first to introduce a concept which has since become widely accepted and understood in fields of political practice and academia.
Professor Meehan’s research and publications of the highest quality on cutting edge topics have been recognised through her invitation to fellowship of a number of international academies and national (British and Irish) expert commissions and boards. Nonetheless she remains an incredibly supportive mentor of junior colleagues and students. In addition to her academic work, Elizabeth Meehan has made a remarkable contribution to understanding and recognition at all levels of the impact of the European Union on Ireland, north and south, particularly in terms of cross-border cooperation and British-Irish relations. Indeed, through her ability to communicate between academic, policymaking and community realms, she has contributed in a very real sense to improving north-south and British-Irish relations at many levels, as well as championing lively debate on European affairs within Northern Ireland. Her tireless efforts to widen understanding of European affairs has been made across a range of voluntary and public bodies, including the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, and has indubitably aided the successful relationship between Northern Ireland and the EU to date. At the Institute of Governance at Queens, in collaboration with others, she sought actively to put into practice what most of just pay lip service to in terms of academic-practitioner cooperation, interdisciplinary research, and making links across political divides. Whenever correspondents spoke of Elizabeth Meehan’s work, they referred to her ‘extraordinary energy’ and ‘tirelessness’.
The inaugural award for 'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary European Studies' was presented to Professor John Pinder, Chairman of the Federal Trust for Education and Research. The presentation was made at the UACES Annual Conference in Zagreb, Croatia, 2005.
John Pinder
The Lifetime Award Jury had consulted a wide range of 'UACES Luminaries', and a shortlist was suggested. While there were kind words about the influence and importance of all the names raised, there was unanimous and heartfelt approval of John Pinder, for his intellectual influence, his unquenchable optimism and his commitment, as one person put it 'in the dark years'. The Lifetime Achievement Award was warmly presented to Professor Pinder, who thanked the audience with a most enlightening talk about his experiences as a main protagonist of the integration process in Europe.