Invigorating Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy for a Resilient Europe (InvigoratEU)

Project idea

How can the EU invigorate its enlargement and neighbourhood policy to enhance Europe’s resilience? InvigoratEU aims at finding answers to this question by pursuing three overarching goals: the first goal is (1) to investigate how to reform the EU’s enlargement strategy in a new geopolitical phase, how to respond to other actors’ geopolitical ambitions in the Eastern Neighbourhood and Western Balkans, and how to rebuild the EU’s foreign policy arsenal in view of a new era of military threats (triple “R” approach) combining the modernisation and geopolitical logics of EU enlargement, leading to new data – e.g. a public opinion survey in Ukraine, a set of scenarios, an external influence index (Russia, China, Turkey), and a social policy compliance and cohesion scoreboard. The second goal is (2) to elaborate an evidence-based, forwardlooking vision for the EU’s political agenda and institutional frameworks for co-designing a multidimensional toolbox (i.e. two tailor-made toolkits), together with InvigoratEU´s Expert Hub, Civil Society (CS) Network, Youth Labs, Workshops for Young Professionals and Policy Debates in a gaming set up, which will result in context-sensitive and actionable policy recommendations for European and national political stakeholders and (young) European citizens in particular. The third goal is (3) to deploy a CDE (communication, dissemination and exploitation) strategy aiming at recommendations from day 1 to maximize our scientific, policy and societal impact in invigorating the EU´s enlargement and neighbourhood policies to enhance Europe’s resilience.

Participating institutions

University of Duisburg-Essen (coordinator, Germany); Institute for European Politics (Germany); PMC Research Center (Georgia); Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (North Macedonia); The Institute for Strategic Initiatives (Moldova); University of Montenegro (Montenegro); European Policy Centre (Serbia); Razumkov Centre (Ukraine); Trans European Policy Studies Association (Belgium); Finnish Institute of International Affairs (Finland); Institute of International Affairs (Italy); Latvian Institute of International Affairs (Latvia); Vilnius University (Lithuania); Jagiellonian University (Poland); Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (Spain); Maastricht University (the Netherlands); Carnegie Europe Foundation (Belgium).