Fifteen faculty members came to a planning meeting in the spring of 1993. Three of them brought students to the first simulation that December. The simulation has run every year since.
1993
The first simulation was held in December 1993 with students from Gettysburg College, Millersville University and Susquehanna University, about three dozen of them in all. The consortium was then called the Pennsylvania-Maryland Consortium of the European Union, a name it kept until institutions from outside those two states joined and made it inaccurate.
Growth was steady rather than dramatic. By 1998 there had been six simulations and some 725 participants. Sixteen further institutions joined over the following years, and by 2010 the consortium counted fifteen member institutions and close to two hundred students a year.
What changed along the way
Students took over the Commission in 1996. For the first three years the European Commission was played by faculty. Handing it to students nominated by the member institutions put the drafting of the text, and therefore the agenda, in student hands, and it is the single change that most altered what the three days feel like.
The meeting moved from December to November, and the mechanism for reconciling the Parliament and the Council moved with the Union’s own practice, from a conciliation committee in the earlier design to trilogue sessions more recently.
2020 was held virtually, the only year the simulation has not met in Washington. It met.
Membership has risen and fallen throughout, which is what happens to a consortium whose members are individual faculty rather than institutions with a line in the budget. Two of the three founding schools no longer take part. More than three thousand students have been through it.
What each year argued about
Because the file on the floor has to be live and unresolved, the list of topics doubles as a record of what was actually contested in Brussels that autumn.
| 2010 | Policy toward the Union’s southern neighbors, cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, and Mediterranean pollution |
| 2013 | The euro crisis |
| 2014 | The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership |
| 2015 | The migration crisis |
| 2016 | Migration, and Brexit |
| 2017 | Brexit, and respect for fundamental rights and liberties |
| 2018 | Security and defense policy, and a sustainable future |
| 2019 | Digital services and privacy, and the Just Energy Transition Fund |
| 2020 | Recovery from the pandemic |
| 2021 | The Social Climate Fund, and carbon emissions from vehicles |
| 2022 | Human trafficking, and Ukrainian refugees |
| 2023 | Energy security, and the reconstruction of Ukraine |
The record of topics before 2010 has not been assembled here. Recent years have continued on energy, Ukraine and the regulation of the digital economy.
How it has held together
There is no charter, no paid staff and no national office. Decisions are taken at a faculty meeting held during the simulation itself, where the next year’s topics, country assignments, dates and format are settled by the people who will have to run them. Responsibility for staffing the Commission rotates among the member institutions on a schedule published years ahead, and when a school cannot take its turn the turn passes.
That arrangement explains both the simulation’s durability and its fragility. It costs almost nothing to administer and it survives a change of leadership anywhere. It also depends, in every single year, on a dozen faculty members deciding again that it is worth the trouble.
The founding account and the early figures come from the published scholarship listed on the Research page and from the consortium’s own records. If you took part in a year that is missing from the table above, the organizers would be glad to hear from you.
