Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said: “Twenty years ago, the European Union entered a new era with the accession of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. This major enlargement was hoped to bind the countries of Eastern Europe more firmly into the European community, but the feared costs of enlargement attracted criticism. The seminar, organised by the Finnish Institute for Foreign Policy, the University of Helsinki and European Finland, will look back at the enlargement policy of the early 2000s from Finland’s perspective and consider what lessons were learned from the great eastward enlargement. The first panel of the seminar will be in Finnish. 

The second panel of the seminar focuses on the future of EU enlargement. After a decade of stagnation in the enlargement process, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine gave the EU a geopolitical incentive to reboot enlargement. Both the EU and the candidate countries should, however, manage to implement a number of challenging reforms before the EU can accept new members. The outcome of the process is not only essential for the neighbourhood but also changes the EU for good. How should the EU look like in the future? How do young Europeans in particular see the future of the Union? The language of the panel is English.