Check out the event programme here!
With some delay, the Conference on the Future of Europe has now started on 9 May 2021, surrounded by challenges and conditions that have exceeded the need for innovations in the constitutional system and the EU's joint capacity to act since its suggestion in 2019.
The fact that this planned initiative would offer the opportunity to start a new chapter of success for the EU, to implement necessary reforms and to relaunch integration and unification beyond the current crisis management, goes hand in hand with the question of which expectations appear to be fulfillable and where the prospects for the future of the EU may differ at the core.
The Joint Declaration presented is partly in contrast to the changes demanded by various voices with regard to enforcement and unification mechanisms or the improved tangibility of the EU's functioning for the European public.
In conversation with involved European actors, as well as with young voices from academia and the public, represented by Fellows of our Charlemagne Prize Academy, this digital event aims to discuss precisely these differences in expectations of the conference's output and to evaluate the real potential of the resources and forces that will be mobilised. Will Europe use its moment?
In the first panel, Michelle Müntefering, Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office, Gunther Krichbaum, Chairman of the Bundestag Committee on European Union Affairs, and Prof. Federico Fabbrini, former fellow of the Charlemagne Prize Academy, speak about possible structural and institutional reforms. In the second panel, the Vice-President of the European Commission, Dubravka Šuica, the MEP from Aachen, Daniel Freund, the Secretary General of the Europa Union Germany, Christian Moos, and the Academy's Fellow Sophie Pornschlegel focus primarily on the civil society perspective. The event will be moderated by Hendrike Brenninkmeyer, presenter of the ARD Europamagazin.