During the PEC conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA), all four ongoing Horizon Europe sister projects on EU enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy (InvigoratEU, GEO-POWER-EU, RE-ENGAGE, REUNIR) engaged in discussing their mid-term results within the framework of a conference section organised by the coordinator of “RE-ENGAGE” Pernille Rieker from Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. The project InvigoratEU contributed the panel “Invigorating the EU’s Enlargement Toolbox for a Democratic and Resilient Europe”, chaired by Funda Tekin (IEP), the project’s scientific lead. The RE-ENGAGE researcher Morten Bøås (NUPI) was the panel’s commentator and provided beneficial feedback to further advance the papers towards publication.
Elena Ventura, Carnegie Europe, and Giselle Bosse, Maastricht University, discussed the actorness of the EU and its moral leadership potential. They outlined the relative cohesiveness of the EU’s response to the Russian war in Ukraine, while national positions on Israel’s war in Gaza were much more divers.
Artur Gruszczak, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, traced the debate on resilience and capacity building in security and defence. He argued along the lines that the EU’s resilience-enhancing activities directed at its partner states had undergone significant changes due to the long-term destabilising impact of Russia.
Based on the Strategic Culture approach, Julian Plottka, Institut für Europäische Politik, Berlin, discussed Chinese and Russian foreign interference in Ukraine to highlight the need for a multi-dimensional understanding of security threats. He concluded that in spite of the EU’s multi-dimensional approach to security, instruments to address these challenges still required further development.
Levan Kakhishvili, ETH Zürich, analysed, whether EU-induced amendments to the Georgian labour code had direct effects on working conditions in the country. His paper showed that there was no observable improvement of working conditions following increased formal convergence with the EU’s social acquis.
Thus, all four analyses provided concrete recommendations, where the EU had to develop its toolbox further. The discussion on which instruments were most suitable to address these gaps, is the task ahead for the InvigoratEU project.
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