I've spent almost five months in Brussels now. In the heart of Europe if you will. In the beginning, my ambitions regarding my blog were high, I wanted to write about the country without government and its linguistic disputes, I planned an entry on the Europe 2020 programme and I gave my annoyance about the city a form of a column in my mind. Five months and all I managed to do was to change the background of my blog (obviously inspired by a nostalgia for a summer in Finland). No in-depth analysis of the European politics, meetings with the EU bureaucrats (among which Commissioner Olli Rehn), the working of the Commission. To be honest, I don't know if I could give one. I hardly understand what my colleagues are doing.
I arrived here as a pro-European, I think I will leave as one as well but with a slightly more critical attitude. Not per se about the European Union and its politics but about the efficiency of the Commission. I see so many things that need to be improved but in this huge institution with over 20 000 employees even the most modest changes have to undergo a hierarchical and bureaucratic mechanism. New ideas and daring visions are transformed into bland proposals during this long process. At the Commission, I have really started appreciating the academic freedom and the liberty academic work can offer to ambitious researchers.
When in June I defended my PhD thesis, I was happy to get the burden of the thesis from my shoulders. But in September I will be back in academia, this time in Antwerp as a post-doctoral researcher. I'm pretty sure I will miss some aspects of the European institutions there but I'm also quite excited about the new research I can start from the scratch (indeed, from a scratch, any ideas?). And Antwerp, in the Flemish part of Belgium, is not quite like the Belgium you learn to know in Brussels. It's pretty, bicycle-friendly and clean - a city that has already entered the 21st century in contrast to Brussels that feels like a place you wouldn't be surprised to find on the other side of the Mediterranean... (Ok, that's it for my daily rant about the problems of Brussels!)
I arrived here as a pro-European, I think I will leave as one as well but with a slightly more critical attitude. Not per se about the European Union and its politics but about the efficiency of the Commission. I see so many things that need to be improved but in this huge institution with over 20 000 employees even the most modest changes have to undergo a hierarchical and bureaucratic mechanism. New ideas and daring visions are transformed into bland proposals during this long process. At the Commission, I have really started appreciating the academic freedom and the liberty academic work can offer to ambitious researchers.
When in June I defended my PhD thesis, I was happy to get the burden of the thesis from my shoulders. But in September I will be back in academia, this time in Antwerp as a post-doctoral researcher. I'm pretty sure I will miss some aspects of the European institutions there but I'm also quite excited about the new research I can start from the scratch (indeed, from a scratch, any ideas?). And Antwerp, in the Flemish part of Belgium, is not quite like the Belgium you learn to know in Brussels. It's pretty, bicycle-friendly and clean - a city that has already entered the 21st century in contrast to Brussels that feels like a place you wouldn't be surprised to find on the other side of the Mediterranean... (Ok, that's it for my daily rant about the problems of Brussels!)
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