European Political Community

SYMPOSIUM

stay alert keep smart

THE EUROPEAN POLITICAL COMMUNITY

JUNE 2023

Table of Contents

1. Search for the European Political Community’s identity – a pan European political ‘bazaar’ or a quiet room for peace-making?

Roman Petrov

2. e European Political Community should make itself the United Nations of Free Europe

Derrick Wya

3. A new structure to address old problems: looking at the EPC through a historian’s lens Piers

Ludlow

4. e European Political Community: a Constitutional Experiment in Europe Luigi

Lonardo

Search for the European Political Community’s identity – a pan European political ‘bazaar’ or a quiet room for peace-making?

Roman Petrov

e year 2022 was marked by turbulent and profound geopolitical shis in the European continent and beyond. e Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022 has tested the EU’s resilience and political autonomy. It pushed the EU to search for new forms of political cooperation to achieve solidarity and strengthenitsresiliencetodefenditscommonvalues.

One of these new forms of cooperation is the European Political Community (EPC) proposed by French President Macron in May 2022 at the time of its Presidency of the EU Council. e French Government outlined its vision of the EPC as a new political platform that would be ‘ open to European States that share a common set of democratic values, whether or not they are members of the Union and regardless of the nature of their current relationship with the European Union’ with the overall purpose to ‘strengthen the political, economic, cultural and security links between its members’. It may cover the cooperation within ‘foreign and security policy issues, climate change and the supply of energy and other raw materials, food security, infrastructure development and interconnection, mobility, migration, the ght against organized crime, relations with other geopolitical actors’ Overall, the EPC would ‘provide a forum for coordination, decision-making and cooperative projects to respond in a concrete way to the challenges facing all countries ontheEuropeanContinent’( ). Non-paperEuropeanPoliticalCommunity

e European Council supported the French initiative at its Straight away the undeclared June 2022 summit purpose of the EPC initiative was perceived with a degree of suspicion by some third countries. Some candidate countries feared that the EPC could either undermine or even implicitly serve as an alternative to their ultimate EU membership like the European Neighbourhood Policy and as the Eastern Partnership did before However, the French Government importantly that ‘[t]he European Political Commu- underlined nity would not be an alternative to EU membership and would not be a substitute to the enlargement process. For European States wishing to join the European Union, it would, on the contrary, allow for the strengtheningoflinkswithEUMemberStatespriortoaccession’.

Against the background of these controversial anticipations, the kick off-EPC meeting took place on 6 October2022inPrague,atthetimeoftheCzechPresidencyoftheEUCouncil.ismeetingcanbehailedas successful for several straight-forward reasons. First, it exceeded most expectations since there were not many expectations from it. Second, the meeting was aended by an impressive number of European countries with different and even sometimes conicting political interests and objectives For instance, it

i. Roman Petrov is Head of Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in EU Studies, Jean Monnet Chair in EU Law and Head of Department of International andEuropeanLawattheNationalUniversityofKyiv-MohylaAcademy,Ukraine.

aended not only all the EU Member States but also the UK, Turkey and countries of the Eastern Partnership (44 countries of the European continent participated but not aended by Andorra, Monaco, San Marino andVaticanCityandnotinvitedBelarus,RussiaandKazakhstan).

e EPC-kick off meeting did not differ from other similar ‘political bazaar’ events with very lile practical outcome. e organisers were keen to that the EPC is just a ‘platform for political coordination’ emphasise and‘doesnotreplaceanyexistingorganisation,structureorprocess,nordoesitaimtocreateanewoneatthis stage’. In the , ‘at a time when Europe’s stability and security is being threatened, words of President C. Michel we need more dialogue, more listening, more mutual understanding, not less. And that’s what we achieved at therstEuropeanPoliticalCommunity’.

However, one event that took place on the sidelines of the EPC meeting was well-noticed It was an informal peace dialogue meeting between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, moderated by EU actors. By common surprise this meeting led to very practical outcomes. First, the parties agreed to participate in work oftheborderdelimitationcommissionsbytheendofOctober2022.Second,Armeniareachedanagreement to facilitate a civilian EU mission alongside the border with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan agreed to cooperate with this mission as far as it is concerned. According to the following the quadrilateral meeting, the aim statement of the mission is to build condence between the conicting parties and, through its reports, to contribute to thebordercommissions.

e EU High Representative in Common Foreign Security Policy, in the Joseph Borrell, concluded aermath of the EPC kick-off meeting that the EPC may be seen as: (1) a community of shared principles through an alignment on principles that guarantee peace and stability on the continent; (2) a community of resilience to reduce the exposure and vulnerability of European countries to risks and threats of an increasingly hybrid nature; (3) a community of cooperation aimed at strengthening economic cooperation, interconnectedness and cross-border sectorial cooperation; and (4) a community that adds value to existing institutionsandformatssincetheEPCiscomplementarytotheEUpoliciesandotherregionalframeworks.

In this respect the results of the EPC kick-off meeting in Prague gave us some hope to consider this political initiative as a potentially suitable platform to resolve difficult disputes among countries of the European continent. e initial success of the Armenia and Azerbaijan peace dialogue inevitably brings us to the question if the EPC could serve as a possible platform for a peace dialogue between Ukraine and Russia. To answerthisquestionthefollowingquestionscanbeconsidered:

• Can Russiaand Belarus be invited to participate in the forthcoming EPC meetings and activities?It goes without saying that representatives of the current Russian and Belarussian regimes cannot be welcomed to any meetings under the EPC’s framework. However, representatives of the internationally recognised opposition of these countries could be invited to aend the EPC’s meetings to discuss possible formats of the EU policies with post-war Russia and Belarus. In the current tragic circumstances of the ongoing war in Ukraine, aention should be paid to the important task of unifying and consolidating opposition movements in Russia and Belarus. Furthermore, people of these countries must be given a chance to know about possible alternatives to today’s stalemate status quo in EU-Russia and EU-Belarus relations Engagement of Russian and Belarussian opposition leaders in the activities of the EPC could considerablycontributetothiscourse.

• Can the EPC become a platform for future peace talks between Ukraine and Russia? In the meantime, it is impossible to envisage the participation of representatives of the current regimes in Russia and Belarus in Ukraine-Russia peace talks under the aegis of the EPC. It simply contradicts the idea of the EPC as a community of shared democratic values and principles. Nevertheless, the EPC participants, jointly with the Russian and Belarussian opposition leaders, may contribute to the elaboration of guiding principles of a potential Ukraine-Russia Peace Deal, of course, with the close engagement of Ukraine. It is important to make public how a future Peace Deal may affect post-war Russia and Belarus A transparent and consistent position of the EPC on this issue will counterbalance intrusive Russian propaganda and will send a clear signal of support of the change of the current regimes in these countries. It is important to sendastrongmessagethatapost-warcomebackofRussiaandBelarustoEuropeispossible.

AlltheseconsiderationsarehighlydependentonthefuturegeopoliticalstatusquoandcredibilityoftheEPC following the success/failure of the Armenia and Azerbaijan peace dialogue. In 2023 the EU has invested considerable political and mediation efforts into the Armenia and Azerbaijan peace dialogue. us, it was at top agenda of the second EPC meeting on 01 June 2023 in Chisinau, Moldova Despite absence of any concluding joint statement the second EPC meeting was hailed as a success Participants of the EPC meeting used this platform as informal meeting fórum to discuss most delicate and intrícate issues within and beyond the EU. For instance, the Slovakian Prime Minister Ľubica Karvašová highlighted the EPC promising potential within dimensions of nuclear energy and safety, countering hybrid threats and disinformation and crisis management. Indeed, the second EPC meeting was marked further peace dialogues not only between Armenia and Azerbaijan but also betweenn Serbia and Kosovo It is obvious that the EPC also contains considerable potential for the direct EU-Russia dialogue. It is the fact that the EPC platform hosts almost all countries of the European continent with different policies and geopolitical preferences and, therefore, could bring a real chance to end the war in Ukraine and, consequently, to support regime change in Russia andBelarus

e European Political Community should make itself the United Nations of Free Europe

Derrick Wya i

President Macron is an impressive politician. He inspired more than 40 countries with his vision of a ‘European Political Community’ and managed to stage-manage their participation in its launch. ere was no prior agreement as to the structure or aims of this new body, just a name, and a general outline of its role, provided by President Macron himself What he offered the EU and most of its neighbours was the chance to turn his basic sketch into a working model. is Op-Ed offers a suggestion as to what that working model might look like.

Macron’sreasonsforproposingtheneworganisationwerewellunderstood

One was to give a political voice to countries keen to join the EU but waiting, in their view far too long, for the green light to come in. Another was to offer a consolatory partnership to Turkey, which has spent years as a candidate for EU Membership Negotiations were suspended in 2018 because of its deteriorating human rightsrecord

And then there is the UK. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made strained relations between the UK and the EU andinparticularFranceincreasinglyawkwardandaUKroleintheEPCmightencourageareset.

President Macron offered for the EPC in a speech in May 2022. It would, more details of what he had in mind he argued, allow ‘democratic’ European nations with shared core values ‘to nd a new space’ for political and security cooperation, cooperation in the energy sector, in transport, investments, infrastructures,and the free movement of persons. He adds that joining it ‘would not prejudge future accession to the European Union necessarily, and it would not be closed to those who have le the EU’ In other words, EU candidates would be welcome,butsowouldtheUK,despitehavingletheEU,andTurkey,whichisunlikelyevertojoinit.

ere was another theme too – Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to 15 times in Macron’s speech.

e embryonic EPC held on 6 October in advance of an informal meeting of the its rst meeting in Prague European Council on 7 October. e President of the European Council, Charles Michel, chaired this event. ere was no formal wrien outcome of the meeting and none had been envisaged Formal wrien outcomesshouldbeontheagendaoffuturemeetings.

i. is Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Oxford, where he taught EU law, constitutional law, and public international law He Derrick Wya, KC was formerly a barrister specialising in litigation before the EU Courts and is currently a Member of the International Academic Council of Fide Fundación,anindependentandnon-partisanSpanishthink-tank.

e invitation list to the Prague meeting included 17 non-EU-Member States e President of the European CouncilandthePresidentoftheEuropeanCommissionwerealsoinvited.Forthelistofaendeessee .here

e summit provided the occasion for an important meeting between President Macron and UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, followed by a which included an agreement to resume UK-France joint statement summits and hold the next one in 2023 in France. e concluding words of their joint statement were that they‘lookforwardtonextsteps’

e broad direction of those ‘next steps’ emerged at the inaugural meeting. According to the account of the proceedings published by the European Council the EPC aims to ‘strengthen the security, stability and prosperity of the European continent’ e two issues which dominated the leaders’ discussions in Prague werepeaceandsecurity–especiallyRussia’swarinUkraine–andtheenergycrisis.

e details of any ‘next steps’ remain unseled, and that provides an opportunity for those aending the inaugural meeting to inuence events, in particular the governments of those countries scheduled to host meetingsoftheEPCoverthenexteighteenmonths:Moldovainspring2023,SpaininAutumn2023,andthe UKinspring2024

e rst ‘next step’ upcoming host nations could take would be to signal willingness to form a host-nations working group, based on the ‘trios’ arrangement which applies to the rotating 6-month Presidency of the Council. Under this laer arrangement the Presidency of the day works together with its predecessor and successor. is trio sets long-term goals and prepares a common agenda determining the topics and major issues that will be addressed by the Council over an 18-month period. eir plans are prepared in close cooperationwiththeCommissionandthePresidentoftheEuropeanCouncil

is model could be adapted for the EPC. It would mean that the rst trio would be Moldova, Spain and the UK, the Czech Republic’s hosting of the launch event does not count. is formula would mean that there would always be two non-EU Members and one EU Member in the host-nation planning group, if the paern of EU and non-EU hosts alternating continues, which it should and likely will e EU Members would no doubt work closely with the European Commission and the President of the European Council, and the non-EU members would have to liaise widely. Other meetings and groups could prepare the ground for summits, . At least one future host shows signs of moving in this direction. A UK as happens with the G7 Foreign Office Minister announced in Parliament on 31st October 2022 that the UK would engage with hosts Moldova and Spain to shape not just the UK hosted event but also those hosted by Moldova and Spain. It would also be open to trios to publicise their deliberations about the agenda and priorities of the EPC, which would give the EPC some existence or at least prole between its six- monthly summit meetings. Perhapstheyshoulddothat.

WhatshouldthedevelopingEPClooklike?

ere seems to be a consensus that a binding treaty is to be avoided in favour of an . at informal framework makes sense A good option would be a political agreement on the aims and structure of the organisation, covering any voting rules that might be put in place and the status of votes taken by the EPC. ere would be nothingstrangeaboutanon-bindingwrienframework.Itworks . fortheG7

A simple structure seems to be what is wanted and is certainly to be preferred Proposals and initiatives should result directly from the sponsorship of member countries, without the need for an institutional secretariat.

A low-cost operation would be an advantage Even a frugal administrative budget can be avoided if countries simply pay their own way is would not rule out member countries nancing specic projects or nancing eachother,butthatwouldonlycomeaboutiftheyvotedspecicallytodosoonaproject-by-projectbasis.

e EPC could be very loosely modelled on the United Nations. In fact, at the inaugural meeting Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda tweeted that the EPC could be a Its aim United Nations of Europe in the making would be the achievement of security, stability and prosperity on the European continent. at catch-all formulationguredinthePraguedocumentation.

Concernsabout the EPC duplicating the work of other bodiessuch as the G7, NATO, the Council of Europe, OSCE and the UN are exaggerated e activities of international organisations can overlap without causing problems. By way of example, all the international bodies referred to above have engaged with the issue of climate change, as unsurprisingly do the annual Conferences of Parties to the Paris Agreements. Foreign Ministers of the G7 issued declarations in May and August 2022 on, respectively, climate change and peace and security on preserving peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait , and No complaints yet from COP27 ortheUN.Severalinternationalbodiesaddressingacommonproblemcancreatevaluablesynergies.

In the ‘United Nations’ model of the EPC, the basic working unit would be its Plenary Assembly, made up of all the Member States of the EPC is Plenary or General Assembly could take collective positions, with the threshold for adoption being, say, 75% of the total membership. Resolutions might create political commitmentsforthosevotingforthem,butnotforotherMemberStates.

ere could also be a role for a European Security Commiee or Security Council is is something France and Germany have oated in the past, as a body in which the UK would participate In this manifestation it mightcompriseFrance,Germany,theUK,andperhapsTurkey,inrecognitionofitsstrategicimportance.

A host-nations trio of , and the UK might be well-disposed to securing recognition for Moldova Spain

Turkey’s place in the EPC in one way or another, though Turkey’s poor human rights record and its ris with Sweden, Greece and Cyprus would guarantee opposition to it having a prominent role. e present writer would argue that such objections should overcome. It is true that President Macron urged that the EPC would allow ‘democratic’ European nations with shared core values to engage in political and security cooperation, and some would argue about Turkey’s democratic credentials, but part of the rationale of having an EPC in the rst place was to nd a place for Turkey on the right side of the geopolitical divide between‘freeEurope’,ontheoneside, androguestatesRussiaandBelarusontheother.Itisalsothecasethat TurkeyhaspursuedasomewhatambiguouspolicyonRussiabutithasnotaccommodatedRussiasomuchas toputitonthewrongsideofthatgeopoliticaldivide.

An EPC Security Council of France, Germany, Turkey and the UK would give impetus to collective security thinking by the quartet as well as increasing bilateral security contacts between the quartet and others. e EPC Security Council could also provide visibility to the EPC between summits and adopt and publish

positions taken by consensus of the quartet on issues falling within the general remit of the EPC, without prejudicetopositionstakenatsummitsoftheEPCasawhole.

If the EPC is to hold the interest of the countries which aended its launch, it will have to do more than simplyrepriseitslaunchparty isOp-Edisonevisionofwhatdoingmoremightlooklike

Latestdevelopments

e EPC’s second summit took place on 1 June in Moldova. ere were signs of enthusiasm as delegates from 45 countries arrived at Mimi Castle, the 19th Century venue for the event, but in terms of substance the summitwasdistinctlylow-key.

Leaders joint efforts for peace and security, energy resilience and connectivity, and mobility in discussed Europe Peace and security loomed large President Zelensky to delegates for protec- appealed in his speech tion against Russian aacks, the expansion of NATO and the EU, and a clear pathway for Ukraine to join NATO.Buthisrequestswerelargelytreatedassignpoststootherplacesandothertimes.

President Macron responded that Ukraine needed to be given clear and strong security guarantees,but not at Moldova, rather at a NATO summit in Lithuania in July, adding he would hold talks on the issue with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Potsdam on June 7. He also thought that Ukraine deserved to be in NATO but the time was not yet right. Chancellor Scholz said that a commitment to improve Ukraine’s defence capabilitywasneeded.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated during the Summit that Ukraine’s rightful place was in NATO and said the UK was talking to Ukraine and “making sure that they have all the support they need for a successful counteroffensive”.

President Sanchez agged up Spain's commitment to host the next summit of the EPC on 5 October in Granada.

e Moldova summit, it must be said, also aracted many pledges of solidarity for Moldova itself. But this meeting gave some support to the criticism that the European Political Community might be a surplus additiontothestockofinternationalbodiesalreadychargedwithploingEurope’sdestiny.

Whether the Moldova summit is the beginning of the end for the EPC, or the end of the beginning, might depend on how much political capital leaders of the next two hosts, Spain and the UK, are prepared to invest tomaketheirrespectivemeetingsasuccess

efactthatEPCsummitsproducenoconclusionsleavesapresscommunicationgapwhichcouldcondemn the EPC to anonymity. e lack of conclusions is understandable because extracting conclusions from a gathering of more than 40 nations would be a daunting task But perhaps the EPC could create a “steering group” of, say, a half-dozen nations, comprising past and future host nations, which could elect a chair, and which would produce “reections” on the summit on the following day. Something certainly needs to be done.

Macron’s idea for a European Political Community seems designed to accomplish two related, but separate, tasks. ese are to provide a wider forum in which all of the countries of Europe can debate issues of common concern, and, to create a mechanism to beer manage the ongoing relations between the EU and those many European countries that are not EU members Neither of these objectives is entirely new But historical precedents can be helpful in identifying some of the challenges that the scheme is likely to encounter.

Macron’s rst and most obvious objective was to create a pan-European framework within which representatives all of Europe’s states (apart from Russia and Belarus) could meet. is of course is a dream with a long pedigree traceable, as Edi Rama, the Albanian PM, reminded the last inaugural meeting of the EPC in Prague October,backtotheAbbédeSaintPierrein18thCentury.Butevenifonerestrictsthefocus totheyears since 1945, there have been multiple previous structures intended to do just that. ese began with the establishment under UN auspices of the Economic Commission for Europe in 1947, a body quickly robbed of its signicance by the Cold War. Within the Western half of the divided Europe, rst the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) and then the 1949 Council of Europe sought to establish the widest possible grouping of democratic European states. e laer furthermore would be able to expand its membership on a truly pan-European scale in the 1990s And that same post-Cold War period also saw the birth of another structure with pan-European ambitions, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Also dating from the heady period shortly aer the fall of the Berlin Wall is the one previous project explicitly referred to by Macron as he launched the EPC idea, namely François Mierrand’s abortiveDecember1989schemeforaEuropeanConfederation.

e appeal of a body that covers all of the states of the European continent, instead of just a self-selected group, is obvious. But there are two immediate practical obstacles to political effectiveness. e rst is simply that of scale – 44 national leaders were invited to the Prague conference, plus Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, the Presidents of the European Commission and European Council respectively –which is too big a group easily to organise a free-owing debate amongst, even if, as was done at Prague, the numbers of accompanying officials is restricted to an absolute minimum. e second equally inevitable consequence of a comprehensive membership list, is the huge diversity of size, wealth, political regime, and geography amongst those aending. Reaching any semblance of consensus amongst so varied a group is hugelydifficult. Andthisinturnwilllimittheabilityofthenewgroupingtotakeanybindingdecisions

A new structure to address old problems: looking at the EPC through a historian’s lens Piers Ludlow i

Equally challenging, to move onto three further problems that can be anticipated, is to nd subjects that all participants will be equally eager to discuss in so large a grouping. Macron launched his idea in circumstanceswherethewarintheUkraineprovidedjustsuchanissue. eRussianinvasionrepresentedaclearaffront to the values of all European democracies and as such constituted an obvious spur for the leaders of these countries to meet and to demonstrate their common purpose But while other genuinely pan-European challenges may arise over time – in a subsequent speech the French President listed climate change, energy supplies, foreign and security policy, commodities and food security as other potential topics for the EPC to tackle – there is no reason to assume that the agenda for this particular group of countries to discuss will always be quite as obvious as it was in Prague. And yet without a compelling agenda, will busy national leaders necessarily clear their already cluered timetablessoas to aend? Alsoproblematic will be to identify topics on which the EPC can easily act without infringing on the remit of pre-existing institutions. Of those earlier pan-European schemes listed above, both the Council of Europe and the OSCE still exist aer all. e former, furthermore, has carved out a specialist area of activity in the eld of democracy and human rights promotion which overlaps signicantly with the EPC’s declared objective of upholding European democratic valuesin the face of the Russian invasion.Space probablycan be found for both organisationsto operate in parallel. But avoiding unnecessary duplication or time-consuming turf wars will be tricky. And above all it willbecomplicatedtocreateaforuminwhichallfeelgenuinelyabletodiscussmaers freelyandassovereign equals, when 27 of the 44 participants are not only likely to have arrived at a prior common stance amongst themselves on many of the questions to be discussed, but will also be aending with gures like von der Leyen and Michel whose job descriptions includes ensuring that EU members do not diverge too far from their agreed position. e plenary speakers at the inaugural Prague meeting were carefully chosen to avoid any sense of undue EU dominance, with a succession of non-EU heads allocated prominent roles. Likewise the decision to alternate between EU and non-EU hosts is designed to avoid the newentity from seeming too EU-centric. But avoiding an imbalance when so much of the likely agenda centres on issues that EU will already be dealing, and where the danger will be so real of the non-EU members being made to feel that they are being asked to sign up to a set of decisions taken elsewhere, is likely to tax severely the organisational and chairingskillsofallfuturehosts

is potential problem highlights the second overarching aim of the new organisation which is precisely that of smoothing relations between those countries which do belong to the EU, and those that have applied to join, thosethat feelunableto join, and, in the caseof the UK, thosethat have chosen to leave. Again this is not a wholly new objective In the 1960s, as Britain’s path to EC membership was twice blocked by General de Gaulle, aempts were made to use the Western European Union – an earlier organisation whose seven-state membership coincided with the six EEC founder members and the UK – as a forum within which a structured dialogue, stopping short of full membership, could be held between the would-be member and the Six. e experiment was not a resounding success, however Nor is the other partial precedent, Mierrand’s Confederationproposal,anymoreencouraging.

One of the key reasons why the proposal by Macron’s predecessor failed to get off the ground was the strong suspicion amongst many of the Central and Eastern European states emerging from Soviet rule that the ConfederationideawasintendedtoacttoasasubstituteforthefullECmembership towhichtheyaspired It is for this reason that both Macron and Michel have been so insistent that the EPC is presented as a complement to, not a replacement for, EU enlargement. But this too could be problematic given the presence

amongst the 44 of several states, including Britain, who will not want to be involved in any structure that serves too obviously as an ante-chamber for EU membership. Striking a balance between the use of the new entity to deepen tieswith those stateseager to join and the avoidance of any senseon the part of those who do not want to join that they are being drawn too closely into the EU’s orbit, will be another recurring challenge astheEPCdevelops

None of thesefactors condemn the EPC experiment to certainfailure. On the contrary, the fact that it returns to institutional paths trodden before is in many ways and indication that Macron’s idea addresses a very real series of needs. But knowledge of Europe’s recent institutional history does underline both how many competinginstitutionalstructurestherealreadyareandhowdifficult ithasprovedforanytoco-existwithout friction with the EU in their midst. How successful the EPC proves in such circumstances will prove fascinatingtowatch.

e European Political Community: a Constitutional Experiment in Europe

Luigi Lonardo i

e Russian invasion of Ukraine of 2022 triggered a process of constitutional experimentation in Europe, and it is as part of this process that I suggest reading the establishment of the European Political Community.

What is constitutional experimentation? It is how a system adapts to new developments in an innovative way, by ‘testing’ solutions that may end up becoming permanent. In the broadest sense, the presence of supranational organisations (the EU, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) ‘ ’ was in and of itself an a distinctive feature of post-WW2 European constitutionalism experimentingovernance Inamorenarrowsense,whenitcomestoconstitutionalexperimentswithinone of these innovative organisations, there is abundant on how the EU has literature navigated through the crises stretching constitutional structures of the past and current decade by its . e economic and nancial crisis affected the architecture of the Economic and Monetary Union, the migration crisis concerned the Area of Freedom Security and Justice, and the Covid-19 also resulted in signicant changes to the EU’s constitutional structure What activities such as the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism and re-admission agreements with third countries have in common is a change in the Treaty-established paerns for decision-making. e crises have repeatedly hit the EU’s legal order in a way that has resulted in reshaping it: actors, instruments, and processes of policy-making have been affected e process of constitutional experimentation of 2022 was due to a conjunction of many factors: the scale of the invasion and destruction was shocking; unlike the covert operations of 2014 in Crimea and the Donbass, this time it was too overt to leave doubts on aribution; and for many in Europe it was also unprecedented and simply tooabsurdnottotriggeranurgencytoreact.

e European Political Community is conceivably another example of experimental governance – akin to the EU or the Council of Europe – but with signicant elements of distinction from the forms of recent innovations witnessed within the EU: and the EPC is aer all a different creature, formally separate from it, and as such the EU’ s legal-institutional structure are, for the moment, not affected. At the same time, it would be naïf to consider the formal separation of the EU and the EPC as a maer of fact. e EPC is a step on the trajectory for the EU, not because its members will eventually join the EU (there is and there cannot be such commitment, despite by the President of the European Council to this effect), but because hints they both aim to strengthen Europe on the world’s stage, in opposition to competing world views. Macron proposed the establishment of the EPC, in his capacity of President of the Council, to the European

i. LuigiLonardoisaLectureratUniversityCollegeCorkandVisitingLectureratSciencesPoParis.

Parliament. e invitation to the rst meeting was signed by the President of the European Council, and the summit took place the day before a meeting of the European Council, and in the same place Other links with EUinstitutionsarerecalledin inthisSymposium. ProfessorWya’sOp-ed

eexperimentalcharacteroftheEuropeanPoliticalCommunity

e rst element of novelty – that is, where it breaks with EU paerns of decision-making – is in the actors Membership of the EPC signicantly broader than that of the EU is is, aer all, the point of the EPC: creating an institutional forum that offers something less than membership but more than the current bilateral relations to some non-EU countries (and notably those who applied for EU membership in the immediate aermaths of the Russian invasion: Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine). As the President of the European Council Jean Michel states, it goes ‘ ’ But this in turn raisesthe beyond enlargement question of the ‘added value’ of the EPC, which now has the same membership of the Council of Europe (minusAndorra,plusKosovo).

Processes for decision-making also differ from the ordinary ones of the EU: the EPC is decidedly intergovernmental It is anchored to the pursuit of the interests of its Member States, and not to the interest of the Community as separate from that of the Member States (unlike what happens in Article 21 TEU, which referstotheUnion’sinterest).

Another element of (persistent) experimentation in the continent is the ongoing process of reection, of conceptual negotiation one could say, over the political boundaries of Europe. e question is not merely to understand the limits of Europe in the : if the Southern Caucasus absence of a clear physical border in the East is in, should central Asia, on the other shore of the lake – the Caspian Sea – also be Europe? While it may be counterintuitive to consider Kazakhstan as part of Europe, the country is Europe for the purposes of some popular forms of entertainment (it is part of the Union of European Football Association and of the European Broadcasting Union: a Kazakh team could, in theory, win the Champions League, or Eurovision). But the stakes are even higher: they relate to the place (conceptual, not just geographic) of Russia in the governance of the continent. While Russia (and Belarus) have been excluded from the EPC, a long-term vision could conceivably be of involving them as well, in keeping with Macron’s slogan that Russia must be defeated but not humiliated expressed by Professor Petrov . is is not to contradict the opinion in this Symposium: it is impossible for Putin to be seen siing at the EPC table. But Putin is not immortal, and, depending on what happens aer him, it might be political possible (not to mention ) to invite the representative of the desirable nextRussianadministration.

TwoelementsofdistinctionfromrecentformsofEUconstitutionalexperiments

First, as mentioned, the EPC is entirelyseparate from the EU. Formally, the war in Ukraine has not resulted in institutional changes in the EU (with the exception of a re-organisation of some units, such as the creation of the European Commission’s ‘Freeze and Seize’ Task Force). And so unlike, say, the European Stability Mechanism, the EPC foresees no involvement of EU institutions (while both ESM and EPC are outside traditionalEUstructures).

Second, the EPC is not an entirely ‘ new idea’, because other forms of European Political Community (indeed, even with the precise name) were proposed before To these precedent is dedicated the Op-Ed by ProfessorLudlowinthisSymposium.

Drawingthreadstogether

So, what is the future of this experimental form of governance? e set up of the EPC is contingent and it responds to an emergency It is perhaps inevitable – given the unforeseeable accidents of history, which escape any grand strategy or long-term vision – that the law of international organisations in Europe is reactive and experimental. is is also how EU integration proceeded at time: by aracting under EU law structures that rst orbited outside it. It was, for example, the case of the European Political Cooperation (the intergovernmental, exible, informal forum for foreign policy cooperation of the 70s and 80s) that was formally associated to the Community institutional structure with the Single European Act – and which eventually became the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU. It is not inconceivable that somethingsimilarmighthappentotheEPC.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publishers.

Permission to use this content must be obtained from the copyright owner.

Editor-in-Chief: Daniel Sarmiento

In-Depth and Weekend Edition Editor

Sara Iglesias Sánchez

Editorial Board:

Maja Brkan, Pablo Ibañez Colomo, Marco Lamandini, Adolfo Martín, Jorge Piernas, Ana Ramalho, René Repasi, Anne-Lise Sibony, Araceli Turmo, Isabelle Van Damme, Maria Dolores Utrilla and Maria Weimer

Subscription prices are available upon request. Please contact our sales department for further information at subscriptions@eulawlivecom