News

During Europe Week at the University of Passau Florence Ertel and Julian Plottka organized an InvigoratEU Youth Lab. 30 motivated students discussed challenges of EU enlargement policy and developed concrete policy proposals.

The EU’s decision to grant candidate status to Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine has led to new momentum for EU enlargement policy. However, in addition to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine there are more geopolitical threats to the EU. China, Russia, Turkey and other third countries are trying to exert political influence on EU member states and countries in the EU’s neighbourhood. In order to withstand these influences, the EU, its member states, and neighbouring countries must become more resilient to external shocks.

How to achieve this goal was the guiding question of the InvigoratEU Youth Lab. Florence Ertel (Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics, University of Passau) and Julian Plottka (Institut für Europäische Politik, Berlin, and Jean Monnet Chair for European Politics, University of Passau) organized it during the university’s Europe Week 2025.

Following an introduction to the concept of resilience with a special focus on the EU’s military capabilities, 30 participants discussed specific challenges of European neighbourhood and enlargement policy in seven working groups. The debate cantered around EU cohesion, along with energy, migration, and economic policy as well as the Russian war of aggression. The students were concerned both about the EU’s insufficient actorness, with the 27 member states often showing a lack of political will to act, and about societal cohesion, which is being undermined by democratic backsliding, nationalism, disinformation, and the direct influence of third countries.

After analysing the problems, students prioritized the identified challenges. They identified foreign influence, democratic backsliding, lack of political will to cooperate, and fragmentation of civil society as the most important. In four working groups, the participants developed specific recommendations on how the EU can overcome these challenges. All groups concluded that strengthening of societal cohesion and more efficient decision-making at the supranational level – with less power to obstruct for individual member states – are urgent measures to address the challenges.

Discussions were in the tradition of the Schuman Declaration of 1950, on the occasion of its anniversary the InvigoratEU lab was held. Both the problem analysis and policy recommendations will feed directly into the work of the research project InvigoratEU: Invigorating Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy for a Resilient Europe, which is funded by the European Union through its Horizon Europe program.

Author: Jan Luka Keusemann