The European Parliament, its Role within the Union & in the time of Brexit

11. March 2020 20:00

Prof. Shackleton

Michael Shackleton received his first degree in Politics and Philosophy in 1972 at Worcester College, Oxford. He obtained an MA in International Relations from the University of Sussex in 1973 and was awarded his Ph.D. in International Studies at the University of Warwick in 1985.

Dr. Shackleton gained his first experience of the European Communities as an in-service trainee in the Information Directorate-General of the Commission between 1973 and 1974. Dr. Shackleton joined the Secretariat of the European Parliament in 1981. From 1985 to 1992 he was on the secretariat of the Committee on Budgets; from 1992 to 1995 he worked within the division responsible for relations between the European Parliament and national parliaments; during 1996 he was Head of the Secretariat of the first parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, which examined the Community transit system; from 1997 to 2005 he was Head of the Service responsible for conciliations under the codecision procedure between the Council and the Parliament; from 2005 to 2009, he was responsible for the establishment of a European Parliament web TV channel, known as europarltv, which was launched in September 2008. Having worked as head of the UK Information Office of the Parliament in London from October 2009, he retired from the service of the Parliament Secretariat at the end of 2011.
Dr. Shackleton has published widely on European Union topics. He collaborated with two colleagues, Francis Jacobs and Richard Corbett, on eight editions of a book entitled The European Parliament and co-edited with John Peterson three editions of The Institutions of the European Union. His most recent article was published in 2017 in the Journal of European Integration under the title “Transforming representative democracy in the EU? The role of the European Parliament”. During 2019 he co-edited with Alfredo De Feo, Shaping Parliamentary Democracy – Collected Memories from the European Parliament, a publication designed to accompany an oral archive of interviews conducted with 100 former MEPs.

During 1990 and 1991 he was a Visiting European Community Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley; in May 1994 he was the Sir Edward Heath Visiting Fellow at the Europa Institute of the University of Edinburgh; and from 1994 to 1999 he was a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, teaching a course entitled “The European Parliament and its Role within the Union”. After 1999 he was a Visiting Practitioner Fellow at Sussex University, in May 2004 he was a Visiting Professor at the Institut des Etudes Politiques in Paris.

Since the summer of 2008 he has been a Special Professor in European Institutions at the University of Maastricht, where he helped to organise the European Presidential debates between the candidates for the post of Commission President in 2014 and 2019. He now lives in Oxfordshire and has presented a course on the EU institutions at the University of Oxford.