July 5 - July 15 2008
Prague, Czech Republic

July 5 - July 15 2008, Prague, Czech Republic

European Summer School Guest Lecturers

External guest lecturers have been carefully selected to amend the individual workshops with their expertise. The selection of them fully reflects the name of this summer school - Transatlantic Relations from the Perspective of Central Europe since they come from Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Czech Repubic. Their affiliation (both practitioners and academics) creates another added value of the concept of guest lectures.

• Piotr Maciej Kaczynski - Rethinking National Foreign Policy in EU-27: the Case of Poland
• Olga Gyarfasova - Slovakia in NATO & Milestones of Integration, Political Actors, and Public Opinion
• Zoltan Pogatsa - Hungary's Security Interest and the Actual Practice
• Lucia Najslová - Turkey and EU: time for a new swing in the boring plot
• Petr Lunak - Perception of NATO in the EU and USA
• Tomas Sedlacek - Euro as a Global Currency

Piotr Maciej Kaczynski is a research fellow at Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussles. He is a member of several advisory groups in EU affairs. He is dealing with the constitutional questions of the EU, further enlargement and the position of Poland in the European Union.

Olga Gyarfasová is a Program Director at the Institute for Public Affairs, a public policy think-tank based in Bratislava. In her work she focuses on electoral studies, political culture, views on EU and NATO integration, foreign policy and other major social issues. She graduated in sociology and obtained her PhD in comparative political science from Comenius University, Bratislava.

Zoltan Pogatsa is a member of Institute for Social and European Studies, Szombathely, Hungary. He is a guest lecturer at University of Graz and Université de Nancy, he also works at the Hungarian Academy of Science. Zoltan provides many vocational trainigs for private sector. He deals with different aspects of European integration with the focus on the position of Hungary.

Lucia Najšlová has been since 2004 the Editor-in-chief of Zahraniční politika, Slovak foreign policy magazine. The magazine is published by the Research Center of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, an independent Bratislava based think-tank, where she works also as an analyst in European studies program. She authored and coauthored articles and policy briefs on topics related to EU Enlargement, ENP, EU & Turkey relations and the Cyprus issue.

Petr Luňák is hitorian and political scientist. He has achieved the academic title Doc. at the Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences for his publication "Západ" (West). He is currently working as a director for East-European projects in the NATO headquarter in Brussels (Department of Information and Press).

Tomáš Sedláček is a Chief Macroeconomic Strategist at ČSOB, the biggest Czech bank. Prior to that, he served for more than two years as a non-political expert advisor to the First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Czech Republic, with the special responsibility over fiscal consolidation and reforms. Earlier he served as an economic advisor of the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel till the end of his term in office.