DAN QUAGLIANA
News Editor
On Saturday, Nov. 4, Fredonia hosted the State University of New York’s Saturday Model European Union (SUNYMEU), a one-day simulation of the Council of the European Union.
Directed by Professor Raymond Rushboldt of the Department of Politics and International Affairs, the event lasted for approximately five hours and included the participation of more than 20 students hailing from colleges and universities across the entire state.
“Basically, it was a one-day version of the three-day standard Model EU [event in the spring],” said Alexander Fisher, a senior double-major in political science and writing.
“We had people come from other universities, like the University at Buffalo, and we discussed a few different policies,” Fisher continued. “Everybody represented either a prime minister or a foreign minister.”
Fisher acted as the foreign minister of France in the MEU event, meaning that he had to argue his points in the same way that the actual president of France, Emmanuel Macron, would argue them, even if he personally disagreed.
Just like in the real European Union, students acting as prime ministers sat on the European Council and discussed policies.
While students acting as foreign ministers sat on the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), which is technically part of the European Council, held separate discussions.
The FAC talked about the same foreign policy issues that the real FAC on the European Council would have talked about had they held an actual meeting here: opening accession negotiations with Ukraine, so they can join the European Union, and the Israel-Hamas conflict.
SUNYMEU is careful to stay neutral and not side with a particular member state, according to their website.
“We were presented with an agenda of about seven or eight items, and our goal was to get through all of them to have a vote on them,” Fisher explained.
He related how the student playing Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, wanted to decrease the amount of immigration in the European Union, which is what the real Orbán believes. So the rest of the European Council had a huge discussion about immigration within the European continent.
“We made a compromise. Certain nations ended up taking more immigrants. So Germany, France and the larger nations took more immigrants, and Hungary took less,” Fisher said. “And although it wasn’t totally like how it would work in the EU, it was still an example of how legislation functions in that body of government, [which] I think a lot of us are less familiar with.”
Students found it difficult to, in some cases, argue policies that they didn’t personally agree with as they had to explicitly follow what the leader of the country they were representing would say.
“For me, I watched a lot of Macron’s speeches,” Fisher related. “I did a lot of research on France and their policies and the last 10 years of politics there. It wasn’t as much of me contradicting myself as it was looking in a different lens that I wouldn’t normally look at. You kind of come to some different conclusions and have some different discussions just because of the nature of the Model EU.”
That’s the purpose of the whole event — American students naturally pay more attention to American politics.
“We think about something like Ukraine very differently than France or Germany would, because it’s right on their doorstep,” Fisher said. “We were able to get some new perspectives on Europe that I really wouldn’t have gotten had I not been a part of a model version of how the EU works.”
SUNY’s spring EU event will be held at Buffalo State University on April 12 to April 14, according to its website. If students are interested in participating, they can contact the SUNYMEU office at sunymeu@buffalostate.edu.