Europe: Between Brexit and the 2019 Global Revolt

Thursday, January 23, 2020
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)
William J. Perry Conference Room
Encina Hall, Second Floor, Central, C231
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Vicent Partal

 

Brexit will forever change the way we understand the European Union. But the farewell of the United Kingdom hides a more complex reality. It is not an isolated malaise. In many states, the rise of authoritarianism and the consequences of the economic crisis are generating important tensions.  In some cases —as in France or Catalonia— those tensions have joined the wave of protests that the world has seen in the second half of 2019.

 

Vicent Partal is a Catalan journalist, director of VilaWeb, the foremost online newspaper in Catalonia and the oldest one. It was stablished in 1995. 
 
He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the European Journalism Center (EJC.net). Based in Maastricht (The Netherlands), EJC is a professional organization of continental scope that works for the promotion of quality journalism in Europe and to assimilate the great technological and cultural changes that accompany the digitalization of the media.
 
As a reporter and correspondent, he covered events for several TV and newspapers around the world, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the coup d'état in the USSR and the independence process of the Baltic countries, the Balkan war, the revolt of Beijing students, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the beginning of Palestinian autonomy, the conflict in Kurdistan, the democratic movement in Hong Kong and several elections in the United States.
 
Partal has won a number of awards, including Premi Ciutat de Barcelona of Journalism 1999, Catalonia's National Internet Prize in 2000, and the National Journalism Prize in 2004. He has published several books about Europe, Catalonia, and journalism.