Domestic and Foreign Politics in Europe
Accommodations
Participants will reside in centrally-located hotels in each city. Accommodations are double occupancy. All four hotels provide wireless and wired internet access.
UCLA Travel Study reserves the right to change housing location. Should this be necessary, we will arrange comparable accommodations elsewhere.
Meals
You are responsible for all meals not provided by the program. Breakfast is provided in all four hotels daily except in London, where breakfast is served only on the five days when the group meets for lectures. In London, Brussels and Paris, we will be staying in hotel rooms with small but efficient kitchens. If you prepare your own food you can save substantially on the cost of the program (the recommended budget for spending money takes into account our expectation that students will make use of these kitchenettes).If you have strict dietary requirements you may encounter difficulty finding suitable food. Please let us know when you apply for the program if you have any special dietary needs, as well as any physical or medical conditions. We will advise you accordingly.
Excursions
We will attempt to visit the Dutch house of parliament and the headquarters of NATO in Brussels. The cost of these visits will be covered by the program. The UK Parliament cannot accommodate visits by a group the size of ours, but students can visit as individuals during the afternoon, and in past years students have been able to watch and listen to Prime Minister Tony Blair on the floor of the House of Commons. The French National Assembly does not accept tours by large student groups. Costs associated with these field trips are included in the price of the program.
Free time is built into this program for independent sightseeing. If you plan on traveling extensively, we recommend that you budget additional spending money.
Location
London: For anyone who speaks English, London is ancestral. It is not merely that what we know today as English stems from the dialect spoken around England's capital in the fourteenth century. The Palace of Westminster, where the House of Commons sits to this day, began as the habitat of English kings who there convened the representatives of the people. Students are encouraged to visit Parliament on their own while in London. Great government buildings stretching along the river Thames house the English civil service, the exemplar which so many other governments have sought to copy. In the architecture of the city is written the gradual expansion of democracy in Britain: the Tower where the king imprisoned his enemies (and they sometimes imprisoned him), Buckingham Palace which was converted into the royal residence as the House of Commons gradually tried to separate the monarch from the day-to-day business of government, the Royal Albert Hall built for public exhibitions as the monarch increasingly began to preside rather than to rule, and by contrast the modest exterior (hiding a warren of offices and meeting rooms) of 10 Downing Street, where the Prime Minister governs.
London is far more than politics, of course. The British Museum houses extraordinary artifacts gathered not only in the course of Britain's colonial expansion during the 18th and 19th centuries but also in the travels of wealthy amateurs. In addition, specialized museums show displays on every possible topic. Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote here, Gandhi studied law in the Inns of Court, Sherlock Holmes's fictional address is available for viewing, Karl Marx lies in Highgate Cemetery, even during summer the theater is active, every kind of music is performed in the clubs, the National Gallery of Art is distinguished. Admire the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. Or just go walk in the great green parks -- Hyde, St. James, Hampstead Heath.
Weekends will be free from classes. England is less than half the size of California. Take a day trip outside London by train: Oxford to look at the university, Bath to look at the greenery of the West, Brighton to see the beaches.
Amsterdam: If London and Paris are royal cities, Amsterdam is historically bourgeois. The city center is built on three semi-circular canals -- the Gentlemen's, the Princes', the Emperor's -- where the houses of the great commercial families that ruled Amsterdam until the nineteenth century still stand. They made so much money trading north to the Baltic, south to Spain, west to England and east to Germany, and then carrying spices from the East Indies, that they financed the royal houses of all the rest of Europe. They put their earnings into art and architecture that can still be seen in the magnificent Rijksmuseum, where the holdings rival the Louvre. As the trade declined, wealth could no longer protect a small country, where tragedy followed: visit the house where the German Jewish teenager Anne Frank hid with her family from the Nazi occupation, only to be discovered and deported to die, leaving her diary of the years of concealment to be recovered. And in the midst of feeling her loss, find comfort in the ethics that moved a Dutch woman to hide her.
Despite its past, Amsterdam is a fun city. No longer the center of a trading empire, it has turned to welcoming tourists, and especially youthful ones. The Dutch boast that their school graduates speak better English than ours. This boast is actually not true, but its plausibility speaks volumes about the ease of communicating. In Amsterdam we stay in a hotel built to preserve the facade of old houses between two canals immediately east of the Dam from which the city takes its name that it remains its center. A short walk will take you to the Rijksmuseum or to the Leidseplein, gathering point for young people from around the world.
Enrollment permitting, we will take a bus tour to Den Haag for a tour of the Dutch parliament, the Staten Generaal. The Netherlands being a small country connected by inexpensive, reliable, fast trains, you should definitely plan to take a weekend trip outside Amsterdam.
Brussels: The capital of Belgium is turning into the capital of all Europe. On the edge of the city is the steadily expanding headquarters of the steadily growing North Atlantic Alliance, which links the United States and Canada with their European allies in a shared security zone. Closer to the city's historic center are the skyscrapers of the European Union's Commission, which proposes laws for all its member states. The 17th century architecture of the Grand Place/Grote Markt, originally a cobbled open space for swapping the goods of all Europe, is one of the world's most magnificent sights. As the dual names of every street and square reveal, Brussels is home both to French speakers and to Dutch speakers -- as well as to the intense political negotiations that preserve one nation comprising two separate and quite divergent peoples.
Paris:
Paris is Paris. Here the French Revolution developed the basic categories
we use whenever we think about politics. Conservatives clustered to the right
of the president of the assembly, radicals to the left, leaving us ever afterward
with the conception of democratic politics as a choice between right and left.
Here is the Louvre, once a royal fortress, then a residence, then an art museum
when the revolutionaries faced the decision what to do with the king's art collection
when there would no longer be any king. Among the holdings, of course, is an
enigmatic painting that an Italian painter brought along as a gift for Francois
I when the subject's family didn't like it and that Francois hung in his bathroom.
It's the Mona Lisa. The phantasmagoric Pompidou Center, with its exterior escalators
enclosed in glass tubes and the visible steel scaffolding of its structure,
houses the work of modern artists -- other than that found in the separate but
nearby Picasso Museum, whose holdings the government acquired when his heirs
negotiated a deal to avoid estate taxes. Visit the Rodin Museum, and notice
not just the emotive sculptures (the thinker lost in his thoughts, Honore de
Balzac with his protruding belly) but also the Van Gogh from Rodin's personal
collection that in any other museum would be the master work but in Paris is
so commonplace that it hangs in shadow. Take in the Cluny Museum for a look
at the Middle Ages, see the Impressionists in the Musee d'Orsay. Take a weekend
bus to Giverny and see the water lilies that inspired Monet.
Try to eat well, frequent the small shops (remembering always to greet the shopkeeper), and ride a glass-topped boat along the Seine.