Wider Europe: Testing Ground for EU Foreign Policy - European Foreign Policy Scorecard 2015 Launch

Partner: Center for EU Enlargement Studies
Event date: Mar 31, 2015
Deadline for registering: Mar 30, 2015
Venue: CEU, Budapest, 1051 Nador u. 9, Monument Building, Popper Room, 10.30 a.m., Hungary
Category: Other

2014 has been especially turbulent for the European Union with tension rising in its immediate neighborhood to the East and to the South. The failure of the Vilnius summit made it clear that the EU’s Eastern Partnership did not fulfill the expectations and could not account for Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet space. The six partners moved into different directions drifting further from or closer to the EU at various speeds. In the meantime, enlargement reached a stalemate both in the Western Balkans and in Turkey. No real progress has been made in the case of Serbia and Montenegro, and in light of Jean-Claude Juncker’s declaration that enlargement is not on the table till 2019, the EU seems to be losing its leverage. This is even truer in Turkey where Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-democratic tendencies and Turkey’s refusal to support EU sanctions on Russia have provoked criticism from the European Union.

To make sense of such developments, the European Foreign Policy Scorecard of the European Council on Foreign Relations developed an innovative and systematic assessment of the European Union’s performance in dealing with its partners in the world. Since 2011, the Scorecard assesses the engagement of each member state and of the EU institutions on over 60 policy areas.

In 2015, the Center for EU Enlargement Studies brings the Scorecard to Hungary to discuss the past year’s developments and this year’s outlook on the European Union’s neighborhood. Thus, for the first time, Budapest also joins the discussions organized in various capitals throughout Europe that seek to raise awareness on the most pressing questions of EU foreign policy.

Chair: Edit Inotai, Senior Fellow, Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy

Speakers:

Susi Dennison, Senior Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations, London
Levente Benkő, Undersecretary of State, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Budapest
Vladimír Bartovic, Director, EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy, Prague
Péter Balázs, Director, CEU Center for EU Enlargement Studies, Budapest

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Keywords: EU, Hungary, Europe