Over 500 pages of research and 10 months of policy dialogues went into the plan, presented to EU policymakers days after the EU election.
After three years of research by more than 50 academics and experts across 13 institutions and after 10 stakeholder workshops with policymakers across Europe, the ENGAGE (Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe) project has reached its end. Wrapping up just after the European Union elections in early June, the project consortium presented its main findings in a final conference in Brussels and in the white paper ‘10 Recommendations to Make the European Union a Stronger Global Actor’.
Led on the Hertie School side by Senior Researcher Monika Sus, the project brought together a consortium of 13 universities and think tanks to “help the [European] Union become a coherent, sustainable, and effective global actor”. Throughout its course, the project produced dozens of policy briefs, research snapshots, and working papers addressing diverse aspects of EU foreign and security policy. These insights were proliferated and refined through webinars, high-level lectures, and closed-door stakeholder workshops with policymakers in ten capital cities.
As Europe’s geopolitical position has become more challenging, the mission of ENGAGE became ever more urgent as the project progressed. As the final white paper explains, the new EU leadership will take over a Union which “faces an unprecedented combination of external threats”, navigating a “critical geopolitical juncture, at which the very existence of the European integration project is at risk”. To meet the moment and steer the EU toward a stronger global position, the ENGAGE consortium recommends that the EU “become far more strategically selective in how it pursues its interests and goals”.
To that end, the ENGAGE consortium has drawn out the following 10 recommendations, with the first four addressing changes to the institutional framework and the next six addressing specific policy areas:
To dive deeper into these recommendations, read the white paper here. To read a reflection on the ENGAGE journey, check out an op-ed in Global Policy here by Monika Sus and Cornelius Adebahr (Carnegie Europe). To learn more about ENGAGE and explore its publications, webinars, EU foreign policy blog, and more, visit the project website here.
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