Ideas on Europe Blog

Introduction

In her State of the Union address in 2021, EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, stated that ‘we have started to develop a European defence ecosystem’ (von der Leyen 2021). Beyond a mere mention within her speech, the concept was never elaborated on from a policymaking point of view. In essence, while this is a policy signifier, it remains empty of tangible strategies or instruments at the European level. Yet, the concept provides a signal that the EU is moving toward a holistic perspective of European defence and security in the form of an organic collective development, already before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the role of the different parts of what we conceptualise as the Ecosystem has become more prominent. The invasion upended European countries’ defence assumptions, constituting a ‘Zeitenwende’ or ‘turning point’ in European security (Scholz 2024). The uncertainty over the transatlantic commitment since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 further highlighted Europe’s need to strengthen its own security and defence capabilities. It is now critical that the various institutions and actors who constitute the Ecosystem work together to provide for European security given the current challenges.

 

The European Defence Ecosystem in a new light 

As an empty term, we aim to fill in the gap by proposing a European Defence Ecosystem, envisaged as the policy environment in which European and international security and defence actors operate. Conceptualised as the system of actors, institutions and processes engaged within European Defence, it includes (a) the UK, the EU and NATO (and their member states), as well as the defence industry as actors, and any formal and informal bilateral and mini-lateral cooperation between them; (b) relevant institutions and agencies at the EU, NATO and their member state level and; (c) policy instruments, procedures, initiatives and strategies put forward by those actors.

Previous research looked at different elements of the Ecosystem but it never took a systemic approach to connect these moving parts together under a wider framework for defence and security policy making (Håkansson 2024; 2021; Fiott 2023; Bergmann and Müller 2021). It also predominantly emphasised structural factors over the roles of individual agents as norm- and policy entrepreneurs or facilitators within critical junctures or as discursive agents within the organisations involved. We adopt an agent-centred approach emphasising the role institutions play in shaping actors’ preferences and channeling individual agency, incorporating insights from the public policy toolbox, in terms of agenda-setting, policy styles and the role of policy entrepreneurs in moving ideas and concepts forward.

Our approach also seeks to understand how agents navigate institutional complexity and how it shapes the relations between different organisations, engaging with research on institutional complexity (Çelik 2024; Hofmann 2019; Martill 2024), differentiated integration (Rieker 2021; Blockmans and Crosson 2021, Martill and Sus 2023), Europeanisation (Exadaktylos 2012) and orchestration (Abbott et al. 2015) to show this.

Whilst the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided an opportunity for a renewed coordinated response to the war among actors within the Ecosystem, including between the EU and UK, we argue that this specific relationship is the weak link. This is due to a lack of formal defence engagement between the UK and the EU (Sus and Martill 2024). It is clear that since the formation of the current Labour government, there is a window of opportunity to advance this relationship and by extension strengthen the European defence ecosystem.

 

UK-EU relations in the era of Russian aggression

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not immediately lead to a closer security and defence partnership between the EU and the United Kingdom. But it did lead to a clear realisation on both sides that broader, collective issues were at stake and that the poor state of post-Brexit political relations might impede cooperation.

The rapidly emerging division of labour between the EU and NATO coupled with the rapid coordination efforts on the EU side made the UK’s self-imposed outsider status more costly than it had been during the Brexit process (Martill 2025). Meanwhile, the UK’s robust (and quick) response to Russia’s invasion drew plaudits from many EU member states, demonstrating the indispensability of the UK to the European security efforts.

UK-EU re-engagement developed cautiously and informally during this period and was limited by the desire of successive Conservative governments to avoid formal, structured ties. Instead, London focused on bilateral security agreements with countries neighbouring Russia, including Finland, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states.

While the UK did not initially prioritise deeper institutional cooperation with the EU, there was close coordination between London and Brussels on sanctions policy and on support for Ukraine’s defence efforts. High-level calls took place between UK and EU leaders and the UK helped coordinate weapons transfers to Ukraine and shaped the curriculum for the EU’s own training mission (EUMAM Ukraine).

Signs of a new approach emerged in 2023 as the then opposition Labour Party signalled it would seek to negotiate a Security and Defence Partnership (SDP) with the EU if elected. The subsequent coming to power of a Labour government under Keir Starmer in July 2024 provided the opportunity to make this a reality and the Starmer government prioritised this aspect of the reset above other areas.

With the new political opening in London, the climate in EU–UK relations shifted. In May 2025, the two sides concluded a new Security and Defence Partnership, marking a reset in post-Brexit security relations and reflecting a shared response to an increasingly volatile global security environment (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2025). The framework establishes regular high-level strategic consultations, joint initiatives in areas such as maritime, space, and cyber security, hybrid threats, and defence-industrial cooperation, as well as the possibility of UK participation in selected EU defence programmes. While the partnership paves the way for deeper cooperation, it remains more of an opening than a concrete framework of cooperation.

The UK, treated as a regular third country, cannot immediately access new EU defence-industrial instruments, such as the €150 billion SAFE fund. For countries that have signed a Security and Defence Partnership, such as the United Kingdom, the regulation permits participation in common procurement actions; however, loans from SAFE remain reserved for EU member states. As of late 2025, negotiations are ongoing to enable fuller participation of UK companies via the UK”s financial contribution to the fund. However, the talks remain deadlocked because London has yet to agree on the fee structure and full industrial equivalence required for participation.

It is likely that a solution will be found, as the UK’s defence industry constitutes a key element of the European Defence Ecosystem, a fact well recognised by EU member states. Indeed, the lesson from earlier negotiations (e.g., over UK access to PESCO projects as a third country) suggest that – while EU member states are not undivided on these issues – there are strong incentives to find ways to enable the UK to participate from the outside, given the overall boost to EU credibility and strategic action this can produce.

 

Conclusion: What does the European Defence Ecosystem mean for the future of European defence and security?

The conceptual meaning of the European defence ecosystem involves a holistic investigation of the different parts and incorporates their interactions in creating a wider sum for European defence and security. In other words, how do the synergies across the different components of the Ecosystem help build what all the involved partners have in mind in terms of Europe’s role in world politics as a wider sum.

As a new conceptual undertaking with a substantive number of different actors, institutions and processes, this research agenda incorporates different avenues of investigation. We focus here on the ‘weak link’ of EU-UK relations due to the configuration of the Russian invasion of Ukraine constituting a window of opportunity, and the change of government in the UK, bringing in new policy entrepreneurs who are more willing to work closely with the EU on defence in a newly conceptualised integrated fashion. However, it is evident that other linkages are also legitimate fields of enquiry, including Europe’s cooperation with Ukraine, EU-NATO relations, the way minilateralism and informal cooperation frameworks feed into this Ecosystem, and how different actors work with the defence industry, which is also a part of UK-EU relations in this field.

The European Defence Ecosystem does not only constitute an innovative addition to the contemporary conceptualisation of European security, but as a term, it offers the opportunity to synergise with the policy making community. This will facilitate an understanding of the wider implications for defence and security policy, not only domestically but most importantly collectively among the different actors within the Ecosystem. In times of geopolitical turmoil, bridging the worlds of policy-making and academia is not only necessary but imperative – we simply cannot afford to do otherwise.

 

Author bios

Laura Chappell is Senior Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Surrey.

Theofanis Exadaktylos is Professor in European Politics at the University of Surrey.

Benjamin Martill is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.

Monika Sus is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Part-time Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.

The post The birth of a European Defence Ecosystem? European defence in the era of geopolitical upheaval. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Author: Philip Ryan recently defended his PhD – Bureaucracy Mapping: Inclusive Design for Institutional Navigation – at University College Dublin. His research interests include inclusive design, bureaucracy, sociology, technology, user experience, trust, privacy, and migration.

Regulating technology can be difficult, and the current explosion of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has left even the companies producing the technologies struggling to keep up. Healthcare applications powered by general purpose Large Langauge Models (LLMs) are increasingly promising to completely change the provision of care. In medicine and in law expecting one tool to be a solution for everything has similar issues. AI as a panacea can be a poison as much as a cure, especially as it removes protection and agency for users and adds workarounds for necessary regulations. While the lack of service and capacity in healthcare could be addressed by products like “AI agents”, their implementation should not be allowed to escape the regulations already in place.

Should these technologies be subjected to regulation such as the Medical Devices Directives when used for diagnosis? Regulation must engage with technologies that engage with health no matter how their providers try to categorise themselves. When every major AI providers’ chatbot gives health related advice, the fig leaf of “not for medical or diagnostic usage” cannot be allowed to frustrate legitimate attempts to regulate healthcare. Technologies powered by AI are part of the tradition of promising a doctor in your pocket (Lupton and Jutel 2015). In 2025, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is still taking effect against a world economy that is increasingly reliant on the unrealised promise of these technologies. The uncertainty of the Act’s interaction with healthcare still stands (Gilbert 2024). The horizontal approach of the Act makes it “necessary to adopt further guidelines to address the unique needs of the healthcare sector” (Van Kolfschooten and Gross 2025).

Health information online is increasingly provided through AI summaries, obfuscating the origin of the information, inventing falsehoods through hallucinations, and pushing action through confident sounding statements. In replacing web search results, which had become the go to information resource over the previous two decades, they create a dangerous new environment where previously somewhat reliable sources have been replaced by superior looking interactions (Gross et al. 2025). While there has been attention paid to the ability of these LLM’s to encourage self-harm (Yousif 2025), it will be harder to find obituaries attributed to AI’s good intentions and hallucinations, such as dangerous diets, as in a recently reported case of a man poisoning himself after replacing sodium chloride salt with sodium bromide (Burgard 2025).

While precise healthcare regulations may be required, many of the general rules could be used to protect from the excises of big tech. The Digital Omnibus will consider the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), e-Privacy Directive, the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, the NIS 2 Directive, the AI Act, the Data Act, the Data Governance Act (DGA), and the eIDAS Regulation (European Commission 2025), and while not primarily concerned with healthcare they all affect healthcare provision. In some cases, healthcare uses provide exceptions to rules. How can clinicians provide care when they do not understand the ramifications of agreements between the user and companies who own the technologies used for diagnoses, that could follow them through their entire life? As new versions of healthcare become more reliant on their services, how can GDPR consent be meaningfully provided, if the technology is so encompassing that there is no meaningful option for healthcare outside of the technology itself.

Correcting the Duck

The European UACES 55th EUHealthGov panels in Liverpool gave me some great insight into the vibrant research into EU health policy. As quipped by a participant of panel, health policies are often like throwing the duck, taking their own path after their initial toss. Iterative bases of regulations such as consultation periods and full engagement with implementation and standardization phase of regulations are extremely important when controlling the development of healthcare. AI is not sustainable or desirable when it is attempting to turn patients into users.

The regression from health policy since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, feels like a missed opportunity, and the realities of an ever-ageing population and more complex healthcare requirements must not be taken over by false promises of innovative technologies. Visibility and public engagement with regulator processes is difficult but vital. The importance of the patient role must be correctly identified and developed into something beneficial within the evolving spaces changed and developed by technologies. Infrastructure path dependency of AI cannot be allowed to decide what best practise is in healthcare. As these technologies become more all-consuming, healthcare cannot just be a pile of money and data to give AI more power.

The imagined future capacities of generative AI must be questioned, and related benefits and dangers be considered as they are inserted in more and more vital services. For example, the increasing environmental effect of using resource intensive AI in healthcare must also come into play. As per the concept of One Health, the health of the planet feeds into the health of its inhabitants. On the nose examples are coming out of the noise and air pollution caused by data centre developments (Tao and Gao 2025). Changes like the EU Commission’s Digital Omnibus exercise process could bring about deregulation and weakening of the Union’s protections, while inclusivity may seem disconnected from regulatory structures, the complexity of any agreement must be assessed, and comprehension by those affected by it should have some level of consideration within regulatory processes are to be imposed. Simplification and coherence should serve the EU’s long-term strategic vision for a competitive, secure, and rights-based digital economy rather than short-sighted deregulatory moves in favour of technologies that may not work.

Innovation and other techno-optimistic concepts are not solely positive. As Correy Doctorow (2025) highlights, the degradation of services can be seen as strongly linked to the ability to avoid regulations through shifting the activity to an application. It’s legal because they did it “with an app”, especially in the case of Uber (unregulated taxi company), Airbnb (unregulated holiday accommodation), and anything calling itself fintech (unregulated banking). Unregulated health is and will be as lucrative as it is harmful. Will Europe function as a fortress for its citizens, or vassal to new extractive practices of global corporations? While protections are designed into projects, deregulation and other forms of degradation could make initiatives like the European Health Data Space Regulation (EHDS) a pre-collection of sensitive information for legitimate or illegitimate actions. Information provided for a service years ago could be used in manners practically unimaginable at the time of consent to the data being stored, or sold on at the end of business (Church and Smith 2025). In the new realities brought about by these technologies, regulations will have to answer more scenarios and hopefully protect ever more marginalized users/citizens.

While it is possible for technologies to simplify healthcare delivery, reducing the power of related laws should be reviewed with caution. The deregulation agenda of technology companies, which can treat many of the harms caused by their actions as externalities and justifiable costs, should be viewed with suspicion, especially in healthcare. The incursion of companies like surveillance data broker Palantir, offers them unprecedented access to healthcare information (Osborne 2024) highlighting the value of such assets and the protean nature of business interests. The EU’s ability and appetite to create and enforce digital policy and data protection rules is currently singular, and adapting to more aggressive regulatory regimes, and the related race to the bottom should be part of the discourse, especially around healthcare.

References

Burgard, B. (2025) ‘ChatGPT Advice Triggers Bromide Poisoning, Psychosis’, Medscape, 10 Jan, available: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/chatgpt-salt-advice-triggers-psychosis-bromide-poisoning-60-2025a1000qab [accessed 1 Nov 2025].

Church, S. and Smith, G. (2025) ‘23andMe sells gene-testing business to DNA drug maker Regeneron’, Los Angeles Times, 19 May, available: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-05-19/23andme-sells-gene-testing-business-to-dna-drug-maker-regeneron [accessed 27 Aug 2025].

Doctorow, C. (2025) Enshittification Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It, London: Verso.

European Commission (2025) Digital Omnibus Regulation Proposal | Shaping Europe’s Digital Future [online], available: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-omnibus-regulation-proposal [accessed 12 Nov 2025].

Gilbert, S. (2024) ‘The EU passes the AI Act and its implications for digital medicine are unclear’, npj Digital Medicine, 7(1), 135, available: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-024-01116-6.

Gross, N., Kolfschooten, H. van, and Beck, A. (2025) ‘Why the EU AI Act falls short on preserving what matters in health’, available: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r1332.

Lupton, D. and Jutel, A. (2015) ‘“It’s like having a physician in your pocket!” A critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps’, Social Science & Medicine (1982), 133, 128–135, available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.04.004.

Osborne, R.M. (2024) ‘NHS England must cancel its contract with Palantir’, BMJ, 386, q1712, available: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1712.

Tao, Y. and Gao, P. (2025) ‘Global data center expansion and human health: A call for empirical research’, Eco-Environment & Health, 4(3), 100157, available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eehl.2025.100157.

Van Kolfschooten, H. and Gross, N. (2025) ‘Invisible prescribers: the risks of Google’s AI summaries’, Journal of Medical Ethics blog, available: https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2025/11/12/invisible-prescribers-the-risks-of-googles-ai-summaries/ [accessed 12 Nov 2025].

Yousif, N. (2025) Parents of Teenager Who Took His Own Life Sue OpenAI [online], BBC, available: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgerwp7rdlvo [accessed 1 Nov 2025].

The post Treating it with an App: AI Techno-optimism Against Regulations appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The warning was clear over a decade ago, but Britain failed to listen.

Back in 2014, on the BBC’s Sunday Politics London programme, Andrew Neil was discussing David Cameron’s plan to curb EU migration, a plan driven more by fear than common sense.

Nick Watt, then of The Guardian and now of BBC Newsnight, offered a clear and prescient warning.

“The biggest challenge facing the NHS is two million extra people aged over 70 by 2020.

“How are you going to pay for that?  You’re going to pay for that by having young people working and earning taxes.

“And who’s that? It’s immigrants.”

That was also the time Nigel Farage was gaining traction with his poisonous claim that Britain had too many migrants. And it was the time the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, was bending to Farage’s rhetoric by promising fewer EU migrants.

As we now know, Britain needed every one of those EU migrants, and many more besides. The truth was clear even then.

• Britain had a rapidly ageing population.
• A shrinking birth rate.
• And millions more jobs than Britons to do them.

Yet the pro-immigration argument wasn’t properly made in 2014, just as it isn’t being properly made today. If it had been communicated clearly, we could have punctured Farage’s populist nonsense long before the referendum.

We could have avoided the lies that poisoned public debate. We could have avoided Brexit.

Instead, the lies won, and now the architect of Brexit is attempting yet another comeback.

For the avoidance of doubt, Britain needs migrants because we have a growing ageing population, a low birth rate, and far more jobs than we have people to do them.

This is not a complicated message. But because it has never been properly explained, xenophobia has been allowed to flourish and Britain has lost its way.

• Join the discussions about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and BlueSky
• Watch this short video: Britain’s record low birth rate and why migration matters.

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By Monika Brusenbauch Meislová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), Julie Smith (Cambridge University, UK) and Ed Turner (Aston University, UK)

As we discuss in our recent article in the Journal of Common Market Studies, a proposed youth mobility scheme between the European Union and the United Kingdom ought to have been an easy win. After all, who could oppose giving young people the chance to live, work or study across the Channel? Yet this apparently low-stakes, mutually beneficial idea quickly turned into a symbol of post-Brexit gridlock.

Since 2022, British officials had quietly explored the possibility of a youth mobility scheme with the EU. When initial talks stalled, London pivoted towards bilateral deals with individual member states. That move triggered alarm in Brussels. In April 2024, the European Commission tabled its own EU-wide proposal, granting citizens aged 18–30 the right to live, work or study in the UK for up to four years – and offering the same to young Britons in Europe, including equal tuition fees.

The response from London was swift rejection. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insisted that the era of EU free movement was over. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer echoed the same line. When Labour swept to power in July 2024, the new government maintained that there were no plans for a youth mobility scheme – pointing to a “red line” against any return to free movement, even though youth mobility and free movement are not the same thing.

For Brussels, this was more than a technical disagreement. EU officials described youth mobility as “a test of goodwill” and “a token of good faith” in rebuilding trust. Several member states called it their “No. 1 demand”. When London said no, frustration followed swiftly. Across Europe, officials were “baffled” and “dismayed”, while young people on both sides expressed disappointment at another missed opportunity.

At the first formal EU-UK summit since Brexit, held in May 2025, leaders pledged to “deepen our people-to-people ties, particularly for the younger generation”. Yet the rebranded “youth experience scheme” lacks detail, and an agreement still appears distant, even though British politicians, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves, have sought to adopt a more positive framing of the issue.

How did a no-brainer become a deadlock?

We argue that the debate about the youth mobility scheme is striking precisely because it seems irrational. Public opinion in Britain strongly supports such a scheme: 68 per cent of the public – and more than 70 per cent of Labour voters – say they support one. The EU sees it as a confidence-building measure and a prerequisite for progress in other areas, from veterinary cooperation to professional qualifications. So why has a positive-sum game produced a lose-lose outcome?

Our analysis draws on three concepts – bounded rationality, path dependence and bilateralism – to explain how cognitive limits, historical legacies and institutional preferences combined to lock both sides into mutually reinforcing constraints.

Bounded rationality

Bounded rationality describes the cognitive and organisational limits that prevent actors from making fully rational choices. In the case of the youth mobility scheme, both sides fell prey to predictable biases.

In London, policymakers equated youth mobility with free movement. Then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper summarised the government’s view: “The UK voted to leave free movement. We are not going back […].” Yet youth mobility schemes are controlled and reciprocal — and Britain already runs generous versions with Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The refusal to acknowledge that difference reflected a fixed-sum mentality: if one side gains, the other must lose.

In Brussels, the Commission’s timing can also be explained by bounded rationality. Launching the proposal amid a British general election and migration debates was politically tone-deaf. The plan appeared to many in Westminster as a tactical move to block bilateral deals rather than a genuine gesture of cooperation. By insisting on an all-or-nothing, EU-wide framework and excluding potential compromises, Brussels left little room for negotiation.

Path dependence

Old habits die hard. Brexit created deep institutional scars and mutual suspicion that still shape interactions today. The UK for some time relied on familiar tactics — compartmentalising issues, testing divisions among member states, and framing any mobility measure as a threat to sovereignty. The EU, for its part, remains determined to avoid being played off bilaterally, insisting that unity among the 27 comes first.

These path-dependent behaviours keep both sides trapped in defensive postures. What might have been a simple exchange of opportunities for young people has become another proxy battle over control and trust.

Bilateralism

The row about the youth mobility scheme also illustrates the limits of London’s promiscuous bilateralism – the strategy of forging deals directly with individual EU countries rather than negotiating with the bloc as a whole. While bilateralism offers flexibility, it creates inequalities. The UK was reportedly courting six countries, including France, Germany and Spain, but excluding others. Smaller member states feared second-class treatment, and the Commission stepped in to protect the EU’s cornerstone of equal treatment.

Moreover, member states themselves were reluctant to jeopardise EU solidarity by cutting side-deals with London. The EU’s multilateral reflex thus collided with the UK’s bilateral instincts, producing yet another stand-off.

Lessons from the youth mobility scheme deadlock

The youth mobility impasse reveals how the ghosts of Brexit continue to shape – and distort – the earliest stages of post-Brexit cooperation. We suggest that the problem is not irreconcilable interests but bounded imagination: the inability to think beyond entrenched habits and mutual mistrust.

In our view, breaking the stalemate would require three things. First, the UK must move past its conflation of youth mobility with free movement and engage with the EU on the merits of the proposal. Second, the EU should recognise the political sensitivity of the issue in Britain and frame its overtures with greater contextual awareness. Third, both sides need to escape the gravitational pull of path dependence — to see that what was forged in the heat of Brexit negotiations need not define the next decade.

The youth mobility controversy may seem a minor issue, but it offers a mirror for the wider UK-EU relationship. We believe that the lesson is sobering: rebuilding trust requires not just political will but the courage to move beyond the reflexes shaped by the Brexit years.

Monika Brusenbauch Meislová is Associate Professor at Masaryk University (Czech Republic), Visiting Professor at Aston University (United Kingdom) and Visiting Fellow at Loughborough University London. She holds the Jean Monnet Chair in EU Digital Diplomacy and is an associate member of the Centre for Research on the English-Speaking World at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in Paris. Her research work covers issues of political discourse, legitimacy and EU-UK relations.

Julie Smith is Professor of European Politics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Robinson College. As Baroness Smith of Newnham, she sits in the House of Lords. She was previously head of the European Programme at Chatham House. Julie’s research interests centre on the history and politics of the European Union, democracy in Europe and the UK’s relations with the EU.

 

Ed Turner is Reader in Politics at Aston University, Birmingham, UK, where he is also Co-Director of the Aston Centre for Europe. He is Acting Chair of the International Association for the Study of German Politics. He spent over two years recently on secondment to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the UK Government. Ed is a leading expert on German politics and his research interests also cover comparative politics, notably in the areas of political parties, federalism and public policy.

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By Thibaud Deruelle (European Society for Medical Oncology), Sandra Lavenex and Matis Poussardin (both University of Geneva, Switzerland)

When we think of how the European Union (EU) extends its influence beyond its borders, we often picture trade deals or enlargement negotiations. Yet, another quieter—but no less significant—form of cooperation is unfolding through EU agencies. Working on issues ranging from chemicals to border management, around forty EU decentralized agencies have been created in the past decades and have become fundamental actors of EU policymaking in all sectors of the EU acquis. They are powerful channels of what we call technocratic integration: building ties with non-EU countries not through politics, but through expertise, regulation, and shared problem-solving.

In our recent JCMS article, we explore this stealthy dimension of Europe’s external reach by asking a simple question: how much of the cooperation between EU agencies and non-EU countries escapes formal legal agreements? The answer reveals much about the EU’s global role as a quiet but tentacular regulatory power and about the ways European integration keeps expanding—even without formal enlargement.

Looking Beyond the Legal Texts

Scholars previously found that EU agencies play a key role in promoting external differentiated integration: i.e. the participation of non-EU countries in EU policies or bodies (see for example these articles from Lavenex, from Rimkutė and Shyrokykh, or from Kaeding and Milenkovic). However, most research establishes this by looking at de jure cooperation, the formal agreements establishing whether a country can attend meetings, contribute expertise, or access EU data systems. Yet, we suspected that de jure cooperation would only tell us part of the story. We had the idea that much more cooperation would be taking place informally, de facto, outside of any official legal framework.

We compared the de jure access of third countries to the de facto reality of their participation across four EU agencies representing different sectors and powers:

• The European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy regulators (ACER)
• The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA)
• The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)
• The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX)

We compared the formal agreements to hundreds of real-world interactions such as training sessions, data-sharing, joint operations or participation in agency meetings. This dual perspective—on paper and in practice—allowed us to uncover how and why cooperation occurs even when it’s not officially sanctioned.

When Formality Matters—and When It Doesn’t

We found that cooperation between EU agencies and non-EU countries would be formal or informal, depending on two main factors:

1. An agency’s regulatory authority—whether it makes binding decisions or mainly coordinates and advises.

1. Sectoral interdependence—how dependent the EU is on cooperation in that specific field.

Agencies regulating markets, such as ACER and ECHA, tend to formalise their relations through binding agreements (what we call de jure cooperation), because their decisions have legal effects and require predictable frameworks. In contrast, agencies without regulatory powers, like ECDC or FRONTEX, have more leeway to engage in informal cooperation without securing formal agreements, particularly when the EU’s interdependence with partners is high and flexibility is essential. Sometimes, informal cooperation is also the default option when formalization faces opposition.

FRONTEX for instance, operating in the politically sensitive field of border management has signed agreements with countries like Serbia, Albania, and Ukraine, but it also maintains ongoing informal cooperation with countries in North Africa, including Morocco and Egypt, despite the lack of formal arrangements. Where diplomacy stalls, practice continues.

The Subtle Expansion of the European Administrative Space

These findings show that the EU’s influence extends far beyond its formal treaties and membership boundaries. Through their daily interactions with non-EU countries, EU agencies are building what scholars call a wider European administrative space—a technocratic network of national regulators, scientists, and border officials working together on shared problems.

This process contributes to what we term external differentiated integration. While non-EU countries may not have a seat in Brussels, by engaging with EU agencies they start to align their rules and laws with the EU ones, thus building administrative capacity. It also provides a rare opportunity for non-EU countries to have a say in the EU’s policy-making process.

Over time, this reinforces the EU’s regulatory reach—without any new treaty, and often without much political debate. In some contexts, for instance in the case of candidates for EU membership, technocratic integration via decentralized agencies offers alternatives to traditional integration routes. It allows for circumventing some of the hurdles blocking the current enlargement process, thus reaping the gains from regulatory approximation at minimal political costs.

Crises, Capacity and Technocratic Diplomacy

Crises also play a crucial role in shaping EU agencies’ choice between formal and informal cooperation. Contrary to common assumptions that crises encourage informality—since quick action is needed—we find the opposite can also occur. During major health threats, for instance, the urgency of coordination can lead to more formal agreements, as partners seek legal certainty and stable communication channels.

For the ECDC, which deals with infectious diseases, formalization seems to hinge on the urgency of cooperation. The agency maintains close informal links with Western Balkan and neighbouring countries. By contrast, when global health crises erupt—as with SARS or COVID-19—the ECDC tends to formalise relations through Memoranda of Understanding especially with peer regulators such as Canada, Israel, and South Korea. In moments of crisis, formal agreements help to ensure reliability.

At the same time, an important factor behind the pattern of cooperation is the regulatory capacity of the third country. Countries with sufficient administrative resources —such as Norway or Switzerland—tend to formalise their cooperation. Others with more limited administrative resources may rely on informal participation focused on capacity-building.

Why This Matters

Our study sheds light on an often-overlooked dimension of European integration: its quiet, but far-reaching technocratic outreach. EU agencies act as engines of regulatory diffusion, extending European norms and administrative practices far beyond the Union’s borders. This outreach does not replace foreign policy or enlargement—it complements them, building technocratic bridges where political ones may be blocked.

In an era of geopolitical fragmentation, this functional, expert-driven integration offers a powerful but subtle tool for maintaining Europe’s relevance and stability. Whether in energy management, disease prevention, chemical safety, or border management, EU agencies show that integration does not stop at the border nor is it limited to Europe—it adapts, evolves, and travels through the everyday practices of European as well as global cooperation.

Thibaud Deruelle specializes in health policy and its implications for European integration. His book, The Paradox of Communicable Diseases Governance in the EU, was published by Oxford University Press. He currently serves as a Senior Public Policy Analyst for the European Society for Medical Oncology, representing the organization before the European institutions.

 

 

Sandra Lavenex is Professor of European and International Politics at the University of Geneva, Department of Political Science and International Relations and Global Studies Institute.

 

 

Matis Poussardin is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Geneva, specialising in the role of European Union decentralised agencies in European integration and the external governance of the EU. His research explores the dynamics of EU enlargement, regional integration in Europe, and the development of transgovernmental cooperation.

The post Beyond Formal Agreements: How EU Agencies Shape Europe’s Reach Beyond Its Borders appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The first time Europe had free movement of people, a single market, and a single currency was under the Roman Empire.

The Itiner-E project, created with Google’s support, has digitally recreated the enormous 186,000-mile road network that once connected Rome’s dominion from Britain to the Balkans. People, goods, and ideas travelled freely across a continent ruled by Roman law, coinage, and administration.

For the first time in history, Europe functioned as one economic space. But it was a dictatorship.

• The Roman single market was built on conquest, not consent
• There were no human rights
• Millions were enslaved
• Citizenship brought privilege, not equality
• Women were excluded from public and political life
• Power belonged to the emperors, not to the people

Almost 2,000 years later most of Europe once again has free movement of people, a Single Market, and a single currency. But unlike the Roman Empire, the EU is based not on a dictatorship, but instead grounded in democracy, equality, human rights, and consent of the governed.

Winston Churchill had a vision for such a union of Europe almost 30 years before it was established. Back in 1930 he wrote from London for the USA’s Saturday Evening Post and concluded:

“The concept of a United States of Europe is right.”

In his prescient article, which reads like an early blueprint for the European Union, Churchill imagined a Europe without internal barriers or tariffs, or passports, or multiple currencies. He foresaw “the free interchange of goods and services” and “the free travel of people” across the continent. The idea of “European unity” was not new, he asserted.

Reminding his American readers of the Roman Empire, Churchill wrote:

“Europe has known the days when Rumanians lived on the Tyne and Spaniards on the Danube as equal citizens of a single state.”

He added:

“Everywhere, in every age, in every area however wide, or every grouping of peoples however diverse, unity has made for strength and prosperity for all within its circle.

“Why should Europe fear unity?”

Even during the Second World War, Churchill’s conviction did not falter. After the victory at El Alamein in 1942, he wrote to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden:

“Hard as it is to say now… I look forward to a United States of Europe, in which the barriers between the nations will be greatly minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible.”

After the war, Churchill promoted the “union of Europe as a whole” as the only way to achieve lasting peace on a war-torn continent.

The Roman roads that once bound an empire can now be rediscovered through the new digital Google map. By contrast, the roadmap of modern Europe is being built through democratic accord, leading towards Churchill’s vision of a continent united not by emperors, but by its citizens.

Today, almost every European country has volunteered to be part of the EU. A true union based on consent, not conquest.

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• Today, almost every European country has volunteered to be part of the EU. A true union based on consent, not conquest.

• Video: Why Britain joined the European Community in the first place – and why we might join again for exactly the same reasons.

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By Marylou Hamm (Science Po, France / European University Institute, Italy)

From the Greek debt crisis and the 2015 migration crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the European Union has faced overlapping emergencies over the past fifteen years. These crises have tested not only financial actors and member states, but also the very foundations of solidarity at the European level. In response, new instruments proliferated – budgets, calendars, databases, and monitoring tools designed to coordinate national policies across borders.

This wave of innovation, described by some as a trend towards coordinative Europeanisation, came at a cost. The 2010s produced one of the deepest legitimacy shocks in EU history, nowhere more visibly than in Greece. There, the European Commission became directly involved in national policy implementation through the infamous ‘troika’ model. And what began as a firefighting exercise soon evolved into a lasting experiment in Brussels’ intervention in domestic reform processes.

While much has been written about the outcomes of this period – the tightening of fiscal rules, the rise of ad hoc coordination structures, and the expansion of conditionality – far less is understood about how these transformations unfolded from within EU institutions: the concrete conditions through which crisis-born instruments become institutionalised. This is paradoxical, since institutional change depends not only on crisis improvisers, but also on the ‘translators’ who enact learning by interpreting feedback, adjust procedures, and transform ad hoc responses into organisational norms.

The politics of routinisation

In my recent Journal of Common Market Studies article, I examine this process through micro-level observation of EU staff negotiating the routinisation of technical assistance services first developed in Greece and Cyprus in the 2010s (i.e. support to reform design and implementation—studies, training, advice, missions). I define routinisation as a contested process through which crisis learning is debated, negotiated, and institutionalised.

My analysis of the creation of the Structural Reform Support Service (SRSS), now known as SG REFORM, reveals enduring tensions in how the EU conceives its involvement in national reforms – tensions that still shape flagship instruments such as the European Semester and the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

Competing Narratives and Logics

By 2014, even as the financial crisis subsided, its political and legitimacy aftershocks continued to shape Brussels’ internal dynamics. The Greek episode was interpreted in multiple, often conflicting ways: as a test of European solidarity, a story of technocratic overreach and austerity, or evidence of member states’ limited administrative capacities. These narratives did not just circulate in public debate – they divided the Commission itself.

Officials who had worked on Greece faced a dilemma: how to preserve the expertise and networks developed during the crisis, while distancing themselves from the unpopular troika model. Within the Commission, they clashed over the future of these crisis-era instruments – over what it meant to ‘learn’ from crisis. Between March 2014 and June 2015, EU staff circulated draft proposals, concept notes, and organisational charts, each advancing a different vision. Two competing logics emerged:

• The economising logic, defended by the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), framed technical assistance as an extension of economic surveillance – a tool to ensure reforms aligned with macroeconomic targets, embedded within the European Semester.
• The integrative logic, defended by the Task Force for Greece, viewed reform support as a partnership instrument – a means to build trust, ownership, and cooperation rather than enforce conditionality.

These perspectives collided in internal debates. DG ECFIN wanted the new service under its authority; the task force argued it should report to the Secretariat General or the President’s office, reflecting its cross-cutting and coordinative role. Even seemingly minor wording choices – ‘responsibility’ versus ‘solidarity’ – carried political weight, reflecting deeper disagreements within the Eurocratic field.

By mid-2015, the economising logic appeared to dominate. Yet, in a last-minute intervention, the Secretariat General opted to preserve the task force’s structure and keep it under its own authority. This decision endorsed the integrative vision while allowing for a compromise where staff from DG ECFIN were integrated into the new unit, and adjustment programmes and European Semester monitoring remained central to its mission.

This episode marked a pivotal transition in the Eurocratic space away from the emergency policies that dominated the 2010s. It revealed how critiques of past crisis management could align with broader political ambitions – in this case, Juncker’s effort to re-centralise cross-cutting policy tools and politicise the Commission’s role as a managerial and coordinating hub.

The value of drafts

This story offers a rare inside look at how EU institutions ‘learn’ from crisis. Learning is not automatic: it is political work involving framing, negotiation, and the legitimation of competing experiences. Officials did not merely design new instruments; they continuously rewrote the meaning of the crisis itself. Micro-level practices – drafting memos, circulating notes, timing decisions – produced macro-level effects, shaping institutional architectures and the balance between rival visions of European integration. Where a service is located, or how its mandate is described, can tilt the balance between different understandings of EU governance. Studying these internal disputes helps explain how crisis improvisations become organisational routines.

Ongoing Relevance

The lineage from SRSS to SG REFORM, now managing expertise for the Recovery and Resilience Facility, illustrates the persistence of these old dilemmas: fiscal oversight versus national ownership, solidarity versus responsibility. Today, ‘conditionality’ often bridges these poles – combining coercive and coordinative logics in new hybrid forms.

My research on the hidden politics of routinisation reveals not only what the EU does, but how it decides what it wants to become. Rather than treating the Commission as a homogeneous policy entrepreneur, we can see how its evolution depends on the situated work of professionals – individuals shaped by crises, who interpret lessons, negotiate compromises, and embed new routines in everyday practice.

Institutions, ultimately, are made by the people who inhabit them – people who must make sense of crises as they unfold, and who turn emergency measures into the quiet routines of governance.

Marylou Hamm is a Civica Fellow at Sciences Po (France) and the European University Institute (Italy). Her research examines (post-)crisis management, public administration reforms, and the role of experts in EU governance, through a sociological lens.  https://me.eui.eu/marylou-hamm

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On 06 November 2025, EUHealthGov hosted Julidè Mayer for a webinar exploring the EU relations with neighbouring third countries in the area of health. Julidè Mayer is a second-year MPH student in Global Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and has been researching EU cross-border regional cooperation in health. Over the summer 2025, she held a visiting researcher position at City St George’s, University of London, where she was co-hosted at the Department of International Politics and the Law School.

In her talk, Julidè presented the findings of the research project. The aim of the project was, first, to map EU relations with different types of third countries (selected EFTA members and accession states, as well as the UK) using the WHO health systems building blocks framework to assess different areas of health governance and identify distinct cooperation models. Secondly, the instruments characterising those models were analysed along a set of criteria developed by Dayan and Hervey (2024): the extent to which they are formal or informal; narrow or broad; technical or political; and whether they are oriented towards trade or security. 

The findings highlight the multifaceted nature of EU relations with third countries, challenging assumptions of homogeneity in external relations, and underscoring the complexity of health and healthcare governance. As a common thread, we could see that relations with EEA countries (Iceland and Norway) showed the deepest level of integration, with broad, formal and technical cooperation covering both trade and security elements. Relations with accession states were marked by a clear power asymmetry, wherein the EU plays a capacity-building role intended to support the aspiring member to meet the EU’s requirement in a highly formalised setting. The relation between the EU and Switzerland, as well as EU-UK relations on the other hand, are much more reflective of the outcomes of political negotiations relating to narrowly delimited issues, with the emergence of what Mayer described as a UK-EU ‘legacy model’ and Switzerland’s relationship reflecting specific and bespoke outcomes of decades of negotiations.       

Of particular interest in the Q&A discussion was the ‘health data and information’ category, which was an outline where no clear cooperation model could be identified. Several points were raised, both by Julidè and audience members, on why establishing systematised cooperation in health data may be more difficult than in other areas such as health workforce or service delivery. Data protection is a particularly politically sensitive area at domestic levels in many member states, and one in which the EU has always tended towards a precautionary approach. Sensitivities may be exacerbated in the context of the rising prominence of generative AI. Health data is also of particular relevance to health security, notably through epidemiological surveillance and preparedness monitoring. With each health crisis, the EU is becoming more and more involved in health security governance, while at the same time, the securitisation of health in a geopolitically unstable global context also represents a barrier to cooperation. 

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Almost a decade of negotiations on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum came to an end in May 2024. Statements such as “it is perhaps one of the most important decisions in this legislative period, and it is certainly one of the most difficult for many” and “Today is a truly historic day, as we have delivered on the Migration and Asylum Pact, possibly the most important legislative package of this mandate” illustrate how much political weight was placed on the New Pact. As the Pact moves from negotiation to implementation, one question stands out: What impact will a negotiation process that was both lengthy and finalized under enormous time pressure have on implementation?

To understand the interplay of the Pact’s negotiations and implementation, a look back on how the process evolved over the past decade is essential. The first proposals were presented in 2015 in “A European Agenda on Migration”. However, no agreement was reached during the term of the Jucker Commission (2014-2019), due to persistent differences between member states. Upon entry into office, Ursula von der Leyen made a New Pact on Migration and Asylum one of her priorities. To underline its importance she included it in her political guidelines and in the mission letter to Commissioner Ylva Johansson and Vice-President Margaritis Schinas. Although this initiative was more a reformulation of the Agenda on Migration than a completely new Pact, it was ultimately successfully negotiated under the first von der Leyen Commission.

The successful conclusion of the negotiations was presented by the Commission as an important and just-in-time success. But what will the Pact change? Simplified and accelerated procedures will be mandatory in a broad variety of cases, introducing new grounds for detention. Intensified partnerships with third countries constitute an essential part of a reinforced external dimension. Lastly, instead of a binding solidarity mechanism, the Pact applies “flexible solidarity”, giving the member states the opportunity to choose their contribution à la carte.

Political negotiations under time pressure

Upon her election as Commission President in 2019 Ursula von der Leyen made securing an agreement on the New Pact within her term of office one of her top priorities. However, in September 2021, she admitted that “progress has been painfully slow” and urged the co-legislators to “speed up the process”. One instrument adopted to address this concern was an inter-institutional agreement setting out a joint roadmap, signed by the European Parliament and the rotating Presidencies of the Council of the EU (France, Czechia, Sweden, Spain and Belgium) in September 2022. This roadmap set a clear deadline: “Conclusion of the whole Pact by the end of this parliamentary term.”

But even with the new 2020 proposals and a joint roadmap in place, member states remained deeply divided. Some pushed for a mandatory relocation mechanism, while others wanted to limit secondary movements; this conflict continued to be a key point of contention. The differing priorities of member states, combined with the preference of some governments to pursue decisions by consensus, even where qualified majority voting applied, are among the main reasons that delayed the process. Following the roadmap, inter-institutional negotiations were supposed to begin by the end of 2022. However this timeline could not be met, as the Council only reached agreement on several key elements in June 2023. 

The Crisis and Force Majeure Regulation exemplifies inter-institutional negotiations under time pressure. In September 2023, the EP announced that further interinstitutional negotiations would be put on hold. The reason: although close to the targeted end of the negotiations, the member states – again – had not yet taken a position on this controversial piece of legislation. Indeed, the Council only agreed to a negotiating mandate for the Regulation on 4 October 2023. Given that the declared aim was to conclude negotiations before the end of the year, this left little time to bridge institutional differences and finalise such a complex legislative package.

Despite these constraints, on 20 December 2023, the Council announced that a deal had been found on the core political elements of the Pact. After years of protracted discussions, political agreement was finally reached, although many of the technical aspects still required further work. Officially, the EP approved the final package of legislative acts on 10 April 2024 and the Council on 14 May. A four-month period to develop the core political principles into technically mature legislative acts seems to be rather short. Considering that the Pact includes ten legislative texts that are interconnected and supposed to form a common framework without internal contradictions, this appears to be a mammoth task. By shifting the negotiations away from the technical level, the political symbolic value of reaching an agreement came to outweigh considerations of legal and practical feasibility.

Implementation at the technical level

While negotiations on the Pact took place at the political level between member states, the process of implementation takes place at the technical level. At the EU level, this process is steered by the Commission, which kicked the process off in June 2024 with the release of the Common Implementation Plan (CIP). As with the negotiations, there is an implementation deadline: the CIP specifies what steps need to be taken to ensure that the instruments of the Pact are operational by June 2026.

The process had a rocky start: the first major milestone in the implementation of the Pact was the submission of the National Implementation Plans (NIPs) by the member states in December 2024. In these plans, member states must outline how they want  to apply the changes that the Pact necessitates. Although the CIP was published in June rather than September so that “Member States have the maximum time to prepare their National Implementation Plans (…)”, half of the member states missed the first deadline. By June 2025, 25 member states had submitted their NIP.

Besides the rocky start, the implementation process is also complicated by technical problems in the legislation. The political agreement on the Pact promised simplified asylum procedures. However, legal analysis of the provisions of the new Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR) shows that the new rules lead to “considerable complexity”. This is because the new legislation expands the (mandatory) use of special procedures, creating distinctions between groups of migrants. When the APR was first proposed in 2021, NGO umbrella organisation ECRE warned of a “procedural labyrinth”. At the same time, the APR mandates that the asylum border procedure should take no more than 6 months in the regular procedure. The implementation demands far-reaching operational changes to the asylum systems of member states, which were not a focus of the negotiation process.

It is now up to the technical level to ensure that this “procedural labyrinth” is implemented in the member states. To do so, the Commission has created dedicated country teams for each member state and organises meetings of expert groups, attended by representatives of the Commission and member states. According to the CIP, these meetings aim to facilitate discussion and the exchange of information and best practices, and issue guidance. The legal experts of the Commission clarify for member states how provisions must be interpreted. Additionally, the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) is involved in the issuing of guidance and training for those working on the ground in member states’ asylum systems. By June 2026, the implementation of the APR and other instruments of the Pact should have led to “convergence in the assessment and decision-making process of individual asylum applications across Europe (…)”.

What’s next?

We have described a sharp contrast between the political and contested nature of the Pact negotiations, and the technical nature and challenges of its implementation. Even after adoption, this contrast remains: as is stated in the Commission’s State of play on the implementation of the Pact on Migration and Asylum from June 2025, “while progress is being made at the technical level, sustained political engagement and ownership at national level remain essential to address the identified challenges effectively”.

Here lies the main challenge of the implementation of the Pact: while steps are being taken at the technical level, the support for a European approach to migration and asylum policy at the level of national governments is wavering as political discourse on migration moves further to the right. Although we cannot predict the future, recent events such as the (planned) border closures in Germany and the Netherlands have shown that rather than a “coordinated response”, member states favour unilateral, restrictive actions that only serve to further harden Europe’s treatment of vulnerable migrants and weaken free movement in the Schengen Area.

The instruments of the Pact should be operational by June 2026, meaning that the implementation process is over halfway. It is unclear what EU member states’ asylum systems will look like at that time, but the chances of “convergence” are unlikely. For that, implementation is too challenging and cooperation too politically contested.

 

Nicola Diedrich is a PhD candidate at the Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences, specializing in the Centre’s branch on European Integration. Her research focuses on negotiation dynamics within the EU from a micropolitical perspective.

Puck Overhaart is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Public Administration at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focus is on the enforcement of EU migration law.

The authors are responsible for the content of the blogposts.

This blog post is based on the outcomes of the SCEUS Summer school on European Union migration policies, which took place in Salzburg, 7-11 July 2025, as part of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539.

The post The Pact: Between Negotiations and Implementation appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On 30 September 2025, Ursula von der Leyen announced that the European Union will present new climate targets for 2035 and 2040 at COP30 next year. As Europe prepares for COP30 in Belem, these goals are meant to reinforce Europe’s global leadership on climate action. This statement shows that the EU is preparing to move from long-term promises to concrete actions toward climate neutrality.

However, as new targets take shape, Europe’s spending priorities are beginning to raise questions about the EU’s genuine commitment to climate action. The Climate Policy Initiative highlights that only a small share of global climate finance in 2021–2022 — about 5% of the total per year — was directed toward adaptation. The aim of adaptation is to help people and ecosystems cope with the unavoidable effects of climate change — such as building flood defences, improving drought-resistant agriculture, or developing early-warning systems. Yet much of this funding failed to reach low-income countries, where the need for such support is greatest. Moreover, the debate surrounding the $250 billion climate finance proposal at COP29 underscores this issue. While adaptation funding struggles to reach affected communities, NATO members collectively spent €343 billion on defence in 2024, and new rearmament plans could generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂ emissions over the next decade. This imbalance underscores how Europe’s spending priorities may tell a different story about what it values — human security or military power?

This gap in priorities has tangible human consequences. Ultimately, addressing the climate crisis is not only about emissions trajectories or dates on a roadmap, but also about people: the farmers who lose crops to drought, families who flee floods, or communities forced to move because their homes are no longer safe. From local to global, climate change is reshaping mobility across Europe and beyond.

And here, one fact must be underlined from the very beginning: the effects of climate change are not gender neutral.

Women and marginalised groups often face the steepest barriers in displacement: reduced access to resources, higher risks of poverty, and greater exposure to violence. It is essential to adopt a gender lens in any global response to climate-induced migration, especially when it comes to resilience building and addressing the gendered dimensions of climate migration. Yet EU policy frameworks still largely overlook these realities by making almost no reference to gender or intersectionality in national or EU-level approaches.

EU governance policy is gender blind

For all its progress on climate mitigation, the EU remains unprepared for the challenges to governance posed by climate migration.

People displaced by environmental disasters are not protected under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and within the EU, such cases rarely qualify for international protection, as there are deficiencies in the protection of environmentally displaced persons under existing asylum frameworks. While complementary protection mechanisms — such as the Qualification Directive, the Temporary Protection Directive, and the Return Directive’s non-refoulement provisions — could in principle offer alternatives for people displaced by environmental factors, each of these instruments has significant gaps and limitations. Most climate-displaced people remain in a legal limbo: not fully recognised, not adequately protected, and often excluded from access to housing, work, or healthcare.

A European Parliament’s report highlights that people forced to move due to environmental factors fall outside existing protection regimes. Although the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in 2024, is an attempt to create a more coherent approach to migration management, it still fails to acknowledge climate-induced mobility as a distinct governance challenge. It continues to prioritise border control and return procedures over forward-looking adaptation and inclusion measures, leaving a major policy gap.

This gap becomes even more concerning when seen through a gender lens. Displaced women often depend economically on others, face reduced mobility and political visibility, and are more vulnerable to gender-based violence. The UN Women policy brief on migration and climate change explicitly warns that women on the move are more likely to experience exploitation and loss of income after climate-related displacement, while having limited access to legal protection and humanitarian assistance. Despite this, EU frameworks continue to treat migrants as a homogeneous group, overlooking how overlapping inequalities — gender, age, migration status, disability, etc.— compound vulnerabilities.

Towards an intersectional approach

These limitations lead to a broader gap in EU governance, one that calls for a more integrated and inclusive approach. Addressing this blind spot requires an intersectional shift in EU governance. Intersectionality helps us understand how different dimensions of identity overlap, producing compounded risks. For example, a woman with an irregular legal status displaced by flooding does not only experience climate stress. She also carries the burdens of gendered exclusion and legal precarity that deepen her vulnerability.

Without acknowledging these intersections, EU migration and climate frameworks risk reproducing the same inequalities they claim to address. Symbolic attempts — like adding the word ‘gender’ to a strategy document — are not enough. Professor Gill Allwood points out that the EU’s Adaptation Strategy (2021) refers to gender just once in a single footnote noting that “men and women, older people, persons with disabilities, displaced persons, or socially marginalised groups have different adaptive capabilities”. The Mobility Strategy and Action Plan does little better: it mentions gender once, in a paragraph about encouraging more women to work in transport. However, these are acknowledgments, not actions.

The European Institute for Gender Equality has underlined that gender considerations in EU climate and environmental policies remain unevenly integrated and insufficiently implemented. In this sense, many scholars and civil society organisations criticised the EU Gender Equality Strategy (2020–2025) for lacking concrete mechanisms to implement its intersectional commitments, arguing that it remains largely rhetorical and fails to translate intersectionality into actionable policy change. Hence, can the EU truly claim leadership on climate justice if gender remains an afterthought?

What is needed is structural integration, not rhetorical inclusion. This means creating genuine coordination between climate, migration, and gender policy bodies, so these areas work together rather than in silos. It also means using gender-disaggregated data to guide adaptation and migration funding, ensuring that resources reach those most at risk. Local actors, particularly municipalities, must be supported, as they are often the first to face the realities of displacement and adaptation. As highlighted by the Platform on Disaster Displacement, responses to climate-related displacement should prioritise human dignity, rights, and inclusion — not only border control.

Why now?

The urgency is clear. The European Environment Agency recently warned that more than 81% of Europe’s protected habitats are already in poor and bad conservation status. Floods, fires, and heatwaves will grow more severe in the years ahead, driving mobility both within the EU and across its borders.

At the same time, the Gender Equality Strategy (2026–2030) is currently being rewritten. Civil society groups and the European Institute for Gender Equality are calling for stronger, institutional commitments that move past tokenistic mainstreaming. This moment offers a rare opportunity to connect those gender commitments with climate and migration governance. If the gendered dimensions of climate impacts and mobility are not identified and measured at this stage, they will not be meaningfully addressed and implemented at the later stages. Inherently, the same blind spots will persist in the next decade of EU policymaking.

COP30 will be remembered for the targets Europe sets. But it could also be remembered for whether Europe recognizes that climate ambition without social justice is incomplete. Climate migration is already happening; its gendered impacts are already visible. The question is whether the EU will take them seriously.

Conclusion

Climate change is not gender-neutral — and neither is climate migration. Across Europe and beyond, women and marginalised groups are already experiencing its unequal effects. Yet decades of fragmented policies have shown that treating climate, migration, and gender as separate agendas only deepens inequality. The next phase of EU action must confront these overlaps head-on.

As Europe prepares to set new climate targets for 2035 and 2040, this moment offers more than a chance to tighten emission goals — it is an opportunity to redesign governance around inclusion and justice. That means integrating gender and intersectionality at every stage, from policy design to implementation and evaluation, and ensuring that those most at risk are both visible and heard in the process.

If the EU is consistent about equality, dignity, and justice, this is the time to act. Climate action that fails to account for who is most affected will never be truly effective. Targets and numbers may define ambition, but intersectionality will define fairness.

 

Berfin Tutku Ozcan, PhD Candidate in Human Rights, Global Politics and Sustainability at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy.

Authors are responsible for the content of the blogposts.

This blog post is based on the outcomes of the SCEUS Summer school on European Union migration policies, which took place in Salzburg, 7-11 July 2025, as part of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539.

 

The post From Climate Goals to Human Impacts: Why the EU Needs an Intersectional Shift Before COP30 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Thomas Conzelmann and Sophie Vanhoonacker (Maastricht University, The Netherlands)

Trade and foreign investment have become politicized in the current international system. The unilateral imposition of tariffs across the global economy by the second Trump administration is a good illustration: tariffs are not used to address unfair trade practices but as an instrument to exert political leverage and restructure international relationships. As a large, integrated and open market, the EU is clearly vulnerable to such actions. EU decision-makers have also increasingly become concerned about the takeover of European critical infrastructure and technology champions by third countries. Chinese investments in European ports are a key example. Both developments have led observers to speak of a “geo-economic world” in which the EU must defend its interests and its “economic security” (European Commission, 2024; Herranz-Surrallés et al., 2024).

How can the EU live up to the challenges of this geo-economic world? One response is the adoption of new EU policy instruments such as the EU Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) and the EU Investment Screening Framework (ISF). The ACI, also referred to as Europe’s ‘trade bazooka’ allows the EU to adopt punitive measures against countries attempting economic coercion. Commission President von der Leyen and French President Macron explicitly mentioned it as one of the European cards in reaction to Trump’s “Liberation Day”. To address vulnerabilities from foreign direct investment (FDI), the ISF establishes common standards and a procedure for the coordination of member state’s screening of FDI that may carry risks for public order and security. The instrument is currently under review (Doppen et al., 2024).

Existing research has studied the evolving discourse around the “economic security” of the EU and the potential effectiveness of new economic security instruments. However, little is known about the institutional consequences of this new development. What does it mean for the EU if the boundaries are blurred between its trade policy, with its strong role for the Commission, and its security policies, with the predominance of the Council? What is the role of the European Parliament? Is a new institutional balance emerging in this field and how can we explain it? These questions are the focus of our recently published research in the Journal of Common Market Studies. We address them by looking at the ACI and the ISF as two prominent new economic security instruments of the EU.

Is a new institutional balance emerging in the EU?

The EU’s institutional balance is an elusive concept. We use it as a descriptive term for the actual balance of powers between the EU institutions. Specifically, we discuss four analytical dimensions, which are the right of initiative, coordination procedures, decision-making, and implementation arrangements laid down in the ACI and the ISF. To assess whether a “new” balance is emerging through these new instruments, we use trade defense instruments under the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) and sanctions under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as benchmarks.

Our research shows that in both the ACI and the ISF the roles of Commission and Council overlap along all four analytical dimensions. In both instruments, the right of initiative is shared between the Commission and the member states, and both instruments foresee a close procedural cooperation between both sides. A good example of this is the ISF procedures, in which national authorizing bodies notify ongoing FDI screening cases to the Commission and must take comments by the Commission or other member states into account. When it comes to decision-making, both instruments rely on comitology, albeit with important inroads into Commission competences. In the ACI, a unique format has been agreed, in which the Council, through QMV, has to approve implementing decisions by the Commission. This extraordinary step was the outcome of intensive institutional haggling, and was accompanied by a declaration in which the Commission, the Council, and the EP underline their intention not to set a precedent with these arrangements. Finally, both procedures foresee a joint implementation of decision between the Commission and the member states. The role of the EP, which is a co-legislator in the area of trade, remains limited. Although it played an active role in the adoption of the new instruments, it did not seek to enhance its own role beyond that of being informed.

It is difficult to classify the emerging institutional arrangements in the ACI and ISF as clearly “intergovernmental” or “supranational”. Elements of centralization co-exist with pockets of national control and coordination requirements between the different levels. What we see is a hybrid between the procedures in trade defence and in sanctions respectively, leading to a new institutional balance in a field that will only grow in importance over the coming years.

Explaining the changing institutional balance

We show how these findings are the outcome of different factors. In both the ACI and the ISF, the Commission, the EP, and the member states defended their ‘institutional self-interests’. However, these logics intersected with two other developments. First, the member states in the Council were far from sharing a common position. In both cases, one group of member states pushed for joint gains through supranational coordination and credible deterrent instruments, while others prioritized sovereignty concerns. Second, the actors were clearly aware of the institutional experimentation process they had entered. Questions arose about the compatibility of the new instruments with international legal requirements and the consistency of the EU legal order. The “no precedent” declaration mentioned above that was issued together with the ACI is the clearest example of this.

Who are the winners?

Whether the new institutional balance is a victory for the Commission or for the Council depends on how we look at it. Using the CFSP as a benchmark, some observers see the ACI and the ISF as leading to a consolidation of power in Brussels. In their view, both allow the Commission, and to some extent the EP, to enter the security field, an area of Council competence (Freudlsperger et al., 2024; Vlasiuk Nibe et al., 2024). The new instruments are thus seen as a first step from which the Union can “fail forward” and establish more stringent regulation later (Jones et al. 2021). When taking the usual decision-making process under the CCP as benchmark, both the ACI and the ISF imply decreased powers of the Commission. The member states have made inroads into Commission implementing powers (ACI) and have preserved important national prerogatives (ISF). Our research shows that both these perspectives are one-sided. In reality, the ACI and the ISF are characterized by a complex form of collaboration which cannot be easily pigeonholed either as intergovernmental or supranational. With further economic security instruments currently under consideration (outbound investment, review of the dual-use goods regulation), more debates about the right institutional balance in this area will emerge in the coming years.

Thomas Conzelmann is Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. His research focuses on the politics of leverage in global affairs and the EU’s policies in a geoeconomic world. https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/t-conzelmann

 

 

Sophie Vanhoonacker is Professor in Administrative Governance at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the institutional aspects of EU External Relations and administrative governance in the area of foreign and security policy. https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/smrl-vanhoonacker

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Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, kept a secret diary of the talks.

Published in 2021, it revealed in painful detail why Britain lost so badly at the negotiating table. Jonathan Powell, former Downing Street chief of staff, summed it up. Britain was left with:

“a flawed withdrawal agreement and a deeply disadvantageous future relationship, both of which will cause us major problems for decades to come.”

Barnier’s account highlights five key reasons.

1. Prepared vs unprepared: Barnier mastered every detail. Britain’s first Brexit Secretary, David Davis, turned up empty-handed. Barnier was shocked by his “nonchalant” approach.

2. EU unity: The EU27 stood together. Britain tried to bypass Barnier by approaching individual states, but was repeatedly sent back to him.

3. Clarity vs chaos: The EU knew what it wanted. Britain was consumed by internal arguments. Barnier wrote that Theresa May spent more time negotiating with her own ministers than with Brussels.

4. Johnson’s failed “mad man” strategy: Attempts to provoke or threaten the EU backfired. In 2020 David Frost cancelled talks, then humiliatingly returned a week later.

5. The deadline trap: Theresa May triggered Article 50 without a plan. Boris Johnson agreed to a border in the Irish Sea despite knowing what it meant. At one point Barnier had to explain to MPs that “the health of cows cannot be checked by drone.”

Barnier’s diary makes one thing clear. Britain was out-negotiated at every turn. And the consequences are still with us. Britain and Britons were far better off when we were in the EU.

• We had full access to the world’s largest single market.
• We had a seat at the table shaping the rules.
• We enjoyed freedoms and protections now lost, from cheaper food and travel to stronger rights at work.

Some Leave voters now say they did not get the Brexit they wanted. But nobody voted for a version of Brexit. That was not on the ballot paper. People who voted Leave could not know what they would get.

Now many of them, along with most of the country, regret the reality we ended up with.

As Jonathan Powell concluded, there should have been an inquiry into why Britain, once so proud of its diplomacy, was so utterly defeated.

Barnier’s diary may be the closest we will get.

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Towards the 2025 EU–CELAC Summit: Academics and diplomats debate the future of the bi-regional partnership[1]

On 9–10 November 2025, the 4th European Union (EU)–Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Summit is taking place in Santa Marta, Colombia, bringing together European, Latin American and Caribbean Heads of State and Goverment to  strengthen bi-regional relations. This mechanism constitutes the main forum for dialogue and cooperation between Europe and the states of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and is the continuation of the EU–LAC summits held since 1999.

Today, EU–LAC relations unfold within the context of a structural crisis of the international system, marked by the decline of the liberal international order, the fragmentation of global trade, and growing strategic rivalry between the United States (US) and China in key sectors such as technology, energy and supply chains. Since the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 Brexit referendum, illiberal and protectionist trends have intensified, while Donald Trump’s second term has deepened these dynamics through unilateral tariffs on countries and strategic sectors. The EU has responded with an “open strategic autonomy” agenda, combining the green and digital transitions with industrial policies and economic security, while LAC seeks to diversify its ties and advance green and digital reindustrialisation processes, despite structural fragilities and a recent decline in foreign direct investment[2]. This scenario presents both challenges and opportunities to revitalise a bi-regional relationship that, despite a long-standing record of cooperation and political dialogue, has gone through extended periods of stagnation and mutual loss of relevance compared with other actors such as China and Russia[3].

To foster debate ahead of this high-level meeting, on 23 May 2025, the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) hosted a roundtable entitled Beyond the 2025 EU–CELAC Summit: Shaping the Future of EU–Latin America Relations. The event aimed to encourage dialogue between researchers and policymakers, bringing together academics who participated in the European Union in International Affairs (EUIA) conference, along with EU officials and LAC diplomats.

Organised by Arantza Gomez Arana (Northumbria University, UK), Bruno Theodoro Luciano (ULB and UNU-CRIS, Belgium) and Damián Rodríguez (University of the Republic, Uruguay), and with the support of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES), the event opened with a keynote by Professor José Antonio Sanahuja (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain), who analysed the complex geopolitical and geoeconomic context surrounding the 2025 EU-CELAC Summit. He stressed that, after a period of “polycrisis” within the EU and accelerated change in the international system, Donald Trump’s re-election has brought a dynamic of contestation to the liberal order, affecting both transatlantic alliances and the development strategies of both regions. In this context, the EU faces the challenge of redefining its integration model and external projection, while simultaneously advancing the green and digital transitions, reinforcing strategic autonomy, and strengthening the resilience of its value chains. However, this process takes place amid internal tensions and macroeconomic constraints, as well as a global environment marked by intensifying US-China rivalry and the risk of economic fragmentation and trade wars.

Sanahuja argued that the bi-regional relationship must be reframed around mutual interests and tangible results, moving away from the traditional asymmetric logic. Through initiatives such as the Global Gateway initiative and the conclusion and implementation of trade agreements -including the EU–Mercosur, EU–Mexico[4] and EU–Chile agreements- the EU seeks to diversify partnerships and secure critical inputs, while LAC requires access to finance, technology transfer and industrialisation. He warned that the success of this agenda will depend on the ability to coordinate positions in multilateral forums, avoid having CELAC’s internal divisions undermine the relationship, and seize the current window of opportunity to build shared strategic autonomy. In his view, the Santa Marta Summit should not be framed as “against” Trump, but rather as an opportunity to avoid falling into his polarising game and to project an open space based on rules and mutual benefits for both regions.

The second part of the event brought together high-level academic and diplomatic voices. Participants included Anyurivet Daza Cuervo, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Embassy of Colombia; Detlef Nolte, Professor at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA); María García, Professor at the University of Bath (UK); Renata Zilli, Researcher at the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE); and Eduardo Pereira e Ferreira, Minister-Counsellor at the Mission of Brazil to the EU. Each contributed with complementary perspectives on the challenges and opportunities in the bi-regional relationship, from diplomacy and trade to global governance and sustainable development strategies.

The roundtable concluded with an exchange between speakers and participants (academics and students from different nationalities), allowing for a deeper exploration of areas of convergence and the pending challenges to strengthening EU-LAC relations. Participants agreed on the importance of promoting sustained dialogue, encouraging bi-regional research, and exploring synergies between academia and policymaking. The organising team expressed its interest in continuing work on this agenda and in assembling panels for future conferences and international events. Those interested in engaging with these topics or collaborating are warmly invited to get in touch with the organisers, as we aim to expand the network of experts and stakeholders committed to the future of EU-LAC relations.

 

[1]García, M.J. and Gomez Arana, A., 2022. Latin America-European Union relations in the twenty-first century.

[2] Sebastião D. and Luciano B.T.(2023). ‘Moving from EU-centrisms: Lessons from the polycrisis for EU studies and Global South regionalism’ inJournal of Contemporary European Research,19(2): 226-245.https://doi.org/10.30950/jcer.v19i2.1297

[3]Sanahuja, J.A. and Rodríguez, J.D., 2022. Twenty years of EU–MERCOSUR negotiations: Inter-regionalism and the crisis of globalisation. In Latin America–European Union relations in the twenty-first century (pp. 117-153). Manchester University Press.

[4] Proposed for adoption by the European Commission on the 3rd of September https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1644

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An article, published on 8 September 2025 in the Kyiv Independent, brandished the headline: ‘Russia’s gains speed up in Ukraine ahead of high-stakes autumn’. Relying on open-source data, the analysis showed how the average pace of Russia’s advances in Ukraine in 2025 far outweigh those in 2024. Indicatively, Russia captured 363 km2 of Ukrainian territory in August 2024 as opposed to 464 km2 last month, in August 2025.

Figure 1 – The infographic summarising Russia’s monthly advances, as shared in the Kyiv Independent article published on 8 September 2025.

To make matters worse, according to some intel from the battlefield, the Russian armed forces are moving 150,000 troops, backed by columns of armour, to the frontline in Pokrovsk. These valuable reinforcements will inevitably lead to the deterioration of the situation at the front, with dispatches from the besieged stronghold of Pokrovsk suggesting the Ukrainian forces ‘are almost encircled’. The collapse of Pokrovsk, a strategic logistics and economic hub, would put pressures both on the Ukrainian military and the embattled Ukrainian economy.

Non-experts on the Eastern Mediterranean would be bemused to hear that this region, which only neighbours the Black Sea, maintains decisive influence on the course of events in the Ukrainian battlefield. Yet the Eastern Mediterranean has maintained a critical, even if overlooked, role in influencing the fate of military operations on the Ukrainian theatre. How could this be? I hear you asking.

The main connecting link lies in the trade of energy. Recent evidence shows the significant extent to which the European Union has subsidised the Russian wartime economy, and, therefore by proxy, the Russian armed forces. These statistics show that EU member states alone have funnelled more than €210 billion into Russia through the purchase of fossil fuels between 24 February 2022 and 24 July 2025.

By comparison, the EU plus the UK and EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland) contributed €167 billion to Ukraine in the form of military and financial assistance in a similar period, from 24 January 2022 to 30 June 2025.

These valuable revenue flows have enabled Russia to sustain its push on the battlefield. They have enabled the Kremlin to purchase valuable defence components on the global market, replace lost equipment, accelerate the development of weapon innovations, and source domestic and foreign hired guns. The latter has meant that, while Russia has been losing personnel at exorbitant rates, the Russian military has been able to replenish those loses and keep pushing in the battlefield. Best attesting to this is the fact that the Kremlin has avoided the need for a second partial, let alone a full, mobilisation, which would threaten regime stability.

The Eastern Mediterranean has played a crucial role in these energy flows’ continuity. While additional jurisdictions, like China and India, have become important intermediaries in the sale of Russian fossil fuels amidst western sanctions, the Eastern Mediterranean state of Türkiye has best leveraged the region’s proximity to the European market.

Benefiting from reduced logistics costs due to the short distance, Türkiye emerged as the world’s largest buyer of Russian oil products in 2023. With increases in domestic consumption being unable to account for such surges in fuel imports, the safe conclusion is that Türkiye has been a ‘strategic pitstop’ enabling the circumvention of western sanctions. Concurrently, the TurkStream pipeline remains the sole active pipeline feeding Russian natural gas into Europe.

This explains why the US President, Donald Trump, has proposed placing American secondary sanctions on Russian oil if Europe initiates. While some have called this a stalling tactic, a unilateral US sanction would likely do more to harm the American economy while Europe continues to buy vast volumes of Russian fossil fuels.

The fact that this proposal come from the US also reveals the precarious position Europe has placed itself in. While European leaders have been quick to pronounce that they are ready to do ‘whatever it takes’ for Ukraine, in reality they have failed to heed to a US warning that emerged as early as 2014.

Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, (most) NATO member states (re)securitised Russia as a national security threat. This prompted the US to publicly encourage Europe to close its most significant security vulnerability: the continent’s dependence on Russian energy. One of the core propositions that accompanied the US position on European energy security has been to exploit the Eastern Mediterranean as a most suitable alternative supplier. This position became codified in 2019 in the ‘Menendez-Rubo Act’, co-sponsored by then Senator and current Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Beyond the region’s proximity to the European market, two EU member states – Cyprus and Greece –, amongst others in the region, maintain sizable hydrocarbon reserves. This reaffirms the Eastern Mediterranean’s suitability.

Yet, at the face of military threats by no other than Türkiye, the EU has been unable to offer the protective umbrella to Cyprus and Greece necessary to salvage European energy security.

As a result, the EU has failed to arrest its energy imports from Russia even after nearly four years since Russia begun its invasion. The REPowerEU policy – EU’s response to this conundrum – only emerged three months after the full-scale invasion commenced and does not envisage the full phasing out of Russian energy until at least 2027. By that time, if the war drags on, Russia will have been waging an effectively EU-subsidised war on Ukraine for five years.

In the absence of decisive action to leverage the Eastern Mediterranean hydrocarbon reserves, the EU will continue to situate itself between rock and a hard place. Instantly stopping Russian energy imports would cripple the embattled European economies. Before Germany bypassed its own sanctions by indirectly importing Russian gas mainly through France, key German executives spoke of the ‘permanent damage’ to Germany’s economy from the energy crisis. Continuing to buy Russian fuel will of course lead to more Ukrainian deaths in the battlefield and beyond.

Yet, despite the challenges and the collective EU’s inaction, some, but nonetheless important, progress has been made in the Eastern Mediterranean, which further reaffirms the region’s potential. The Greek Alexandroupolis LNG terminal’s construction has enabled non-Russian gas to flow into Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, including Ukraine.

The logistics of the endeavour further reiterate the prospect for energy to play a necessary role in bringing about lasting stability and peace in the Eastern Mediterranean. While Egypt is the world’s seventh largest natural gas producer, domestic demand means that it heavily relies on Israeli imports to conduct its exporting business. Amidst interminable turmoil in the Eastern Mediterranean, this is an encouraging sign for the region. Importantly, it builds on the East Mediterranean Gas Forum’s establishment in 2021, which includes both Israel and the Palestinian Authority along with six other regional states. The Gaza Marine hydrocarbon reserves, which remain intact, mean that they can be used to reconstruct Gaza and develop the West Bank once hostilities end.

Undoubtedly, the continued use of fossil fuels leads to environmental concerns. Paradoxically, exploiting these natural gas reserves can lead to an end to highly polluting instances of warfare. It could have also prevented warfare in the past. Beyond rescuing European energy security and the war in Ukraine, unleashing the Eastern Mediterranean’s energy potential will reaffirm its potential as a global strategic conduit.

A memorandum signed at the G20 in New Delhi in 2023 between the US, Saudi Arabia, the EU, the UAE, France, Germany, Italy, and India resolves to establish the ‘India-Middle East-Europe Corridor’ (IMEC). The Eastern Mediterranean is a critical and necessary conduit in this strategic initiative to counter China’s economic, cultural, and political influence through the parallel Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Similarly, energy constitutes an important, albeit merely one, IMEC dimension.

Figure 2 – A visualisation of the strategic projects associated with ‘IMEC’, which includes energy infrastructure passing through the Eastern Mediterranean

If the EU is seriously interested in doing whatever it takes, then ensuring the development of the Eastern Mediterranean plan occurs unimpeded is the best next step. For academics, the highly consequential linkages between the Eastern Mediterranean, European energy security, and Ukrainian military security expose the increasing interconnectedness between security sectors and regions in a globalised world where international competition is on the rise.

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This publication builds on the paper “Sustainable Finance at an Inflection Point: The EU Taxonomy and its Impact” presented at the “EU Law and Policymaking” panel of the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference, held at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece (29–30 May 2025). The support of UACES in organising and facilitating my participation in the conference is gratefully acknowledged.

Abstract

What counts as “sustainable” in the EU? The answer is not just political, but increasingly codified through technocratic tools. This article examines the EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities as a key instrument of sustainability governance. Originally developed to steer green finance and prevent greenwashing, the taxonomy now plays a constitutive role by establishing the fundamental classification system that defines Europe’s green technological trajectory. Its scientific and technical logic, designed to create market clarity, provides a coordinative framework that aligns investment, industrial policy, and research priorities. Drawing on debates in innovation studies and institutional economics, this article argues that the EU Taxonomy functions as a de facto industrial policy instrument, creating a coordinated selection environment that shapes Europe’s green technological trajectory.

 

Introduction: Defining Sustainability, the EU Way

The global financial landscape is undergoing a profound transformation: concerns about climate change and environmental degradation are increasingly redirecting capital towards sustainable investment. This shift is particularly striking in Europe. The European Union (EU) aims to achieve net zero by 2050 under the European Green Deal, with member-states rallying behind this vision. The EU Taxonomy has emerged as “a cornerstone of the European Union’s sustainable finance framework and an important market transparency tool.” Enacted through Regulation (EU) 2020/852 in 2020, the green rulebook establishes a rigorous, science-based system to classify environmentally sustainable economic activities. Yet the sustainability classification system’s influence extends far beyond its original financial transparency mandate. What began as a tool to prevent greenwashing in capital markets has gradually evolved into an instrument that shapes innovation priorities, industrial policy, and research funding across Europe

This analytical puzzle raises a fundamental question: How does the EU Taxonomy shape technological innovation and industrial development in Europe? This article argues that the EU Taxonomy exerts its influence by structuring a “coordinated selection environment” (Nelson & Winter, 1982) – a framework of incentives and signals that guides the decisions of innovators, investors, and policymakers. It does so by establishing the foundational technical criteria that regulations like the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), institutions like the European Investment Bank (EIB), and policies like the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA) incorporate. In doing so, it creates a coordinated selection environment that powerfully structures economic and innovative activity around its classification of sustainability.

The discussion argues that by defining the boundaries of “sustainable” activity, the Taxonomy shapes “technological paradigms”: the shared cognitive frameworks that guide search activities within innovation communities (Dosi, 1982). This science-based classification system aligns the incentives of investors, firms, and policymakers, thereby structuring the development and selection of green technologies and fundamentally orienting Europe’s industrial trajectory.

 

What Is the EU Taxonomy, and Why Was It Created?

The concept of sustainable finance has long faced definitional challenges. In 2008, Sandberg et. al. identified fundamental heterogeneity in Socially Responsible Investment (SRI), describing it as “terminological, definitional, strategic and practical.” While acknowledging that SRI was the predominant term for investments integrating social, ethical, environmental, and corporate governance concerns, the scholars expressed scepticism about standardization unless implemented through top-down regulation. This definitional ambiguity persisted, with Strauß noting in 2021 that “the discussion about SF lacks consistency and a common understanding of SF.”

The European Commission (EC) acknowledged that achieving sustainable finance objectives required “a common language and a clear definition of what is ‘sustainable'” (EU, 2020). EUR-Lex (2021) offered a broad definition of sustainable finance as “the process of taking due account of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations when making investment decisions in the financial sector, leading to increased longer-term investments into sustainable economic activities and projects.” However, this definition, while highlighting the importance of environmental factors in investment decisions, lacked specific criteria for measuring sustainability.

The introduction of the EU Taxonomy marked a significant shift toward technical precision. As outlined in Regulation (EU) 2020/852, this classification system establishes concrete criteria for environmentally sustainable economic activities. The regulation targets six key environmental goals: mitigating climate change, adapting to its effects, ensuring the sustainable management of water and marine ecosystems, advancing a circular economy, preventing and controlling pollution, and protecting and restoring biodiversity and ecosystems. To qualify, an activity must meet four key criteria: it must make a substantial contribution to one of the environmental goals, avoid significant harm to the others, comply with safeguards, and meet technical screening criteria. This transformation represents a fundamental shift from principles-based to rules-based regulation, replacing interpretative flexibility with science-based technical specifications. The EU sustainability assessment framework functions as a comprehensive checklist that defines what counts as an “environmentally sustainable activity” for investment and policy purposes – a seemingly technical exercise with far-reaching consequences.

The shift in terminology from “sustainable finance” to “EU Taxonomy” represents a significant rhetorical evolution with important implications for governance approaches. The term “sustainable finance” evokes normative goals and principles, emphasizing the purpose of financial activities. In contrast, “taxonomy” carries scientific and technical connotations, suggesting objective classification based on empirical criteria. However, despite the technical framing, normative judgments remain embedded throughout the taxonomy. The selection of environmental objectives, the thresholds for “substantial contribution,” and the accommodation of transitional activities all reflect value judgments about environmental priorities and the appropriate pace of sustainability transitions.

 

From Finance to Innovation: When Classification Becomes Direction

The expansion of EU’s sustainability assessment tool from financial classification to broader policy influence is significant, because it demonstrates how technical standards can become powerful instruments of economic steering. Rather than remaining neutral tools, classification systems like the Taxonomy actively shape which technologies receive investment, which research priorities get funded, and which industrial strategies governments pursue.

 

Capital Coordination and Market Formation

The EU Taxonomy’s most direct impact lies in its capacity to align investment flows across public and private sectors. Originally designed to provide clarity for financial market participants under the SFDR, the green classification system has established mandatory disclosure requirements for large financial institutions. The European Banking Authority has noted substantial engagement with the green rulebook’s criteria across the EU banking sector, with institutions reporting significant exposure to both green rulebook-aligned and non-aligned activities in their climate risk assessments. EIB has integrated sustainability assessment tool’s criteria into its lending decisions, effectively making compliance a prerequisite for accessing Europe’s largest source of public investment capital. This alignment mechanism transforms the green rulebook from a mere classification tool into what a “market-shaping” instrument that actively constructs the boundaries of legitimate sustainable investment (Mazzucato, 2021).

 

The New Architecture of Industrial Policy

While the EU Taxonomy was originally designed as a classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities, its influence extends beyond financial markets into broader policy and research frameworks. The Green Deal Industrial Plan, unveiled in February 2023, does not directly cite the EU sustainability assessment framework. Yet, its entire architecture is built upon the same strategic logic and targets the same sectors. The Plan identifies “net-zero technologies” – including batteries, windmills, heat pumps, solar, electrolysers, and carbon capture and storage – as its core priorities. This list is not arbitrary; it is a direct reflection of the economic activities designated for climate change mitigation within the EU green rulebook (Annex I to Regulation 2020/852). The Plan operates on this pre-defined policy environment, focusing on accelerating production and competitiveness in sectors already validated by the Taxonomy’s scientific screening criteria. This alignment demonstrates how the sustainability assessment framework has helped establish a common understanding of strategic green technologies, which indirectly informs the selection of sectors for industrial development.

NZIA (2023) and the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) (2024) similarly focus on key technologies and raw materials that underpin decarbonization and green innovation. While these policies do not explicitly cite the Taxonomy, they operate within the same sustainability-oriented policy environment that the Taxonomy helps define. The Net Zero Industry Act (2023) establishes manufacturing targets for “net-zero technologies” that closely mirror the green rulebook’s-eligible activities. CRMA aims to ensure a secure and sustainable supply of raw materials critical for strategic technologies. The list of these technologies: permanent magnets, batteries, fuel cells, solar panels, wind turbines, and electrolysers, directly mirrors the technologies and economic activities deemed strategic and sustainable under the Taxonomy’s climate mitigation objectives (Annex I to Regulation 2020/852). In these cases, the sustainability assessment framework functions less as a legal mandate and more as a normative and technical reference point, shaping the boundaries of strategic industrial and technological activity in Europe.

Thus, critical raw materials strategies, renewable energy deployment targets, and clean technology manufacturing incentives are increasingly aligned with the same environmental objectives that the EU Taxonomy codifies, creating a powerful ‘landscape pressure’ – a broad macro-level impetus – that shapes industrial development pathways (Geels, 2014). While these policies do not formally reference the green rulebook, they operate within the broader sustainability framework that the sustainability assessment framework defines.

The Taxonomy contributes towards shaping norms and expectations around sustainable activity that anchor the EU’s industrial strategy. Policies may not reference it directly, because they are already operating within the framework of sustainable economic activity that the EU sustainability framework codified into law. This integration represents a significant departure from traditional industrial policy approaches, where governments typically selected strategic sectors based on economic competitiveness or national security considerations. Instead, the Taxonomy’s technical criteria now provide the scientific and regulatory foundation for industrial strategy.

 

Shaping Technological Paradigms and Innovation Pathways

Beyond capital and policy, the Taxonomy also influences research and innovation funding. Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship research program, prioritizes projects that contribute to climate action, environmental sustainability, and the Green Deal objectives. Its strategic plan (2025–2027) earmarks significant shares of funding for climate-related activities and biodiversity projects, effectively incentivizing research aligned with EU environmental objectives. While the program does not explicitly require applicants to reference the green framework, its priorities reflect the broader sustainability and Green Deal framework.

In practice, this means that successful proposals increasingly need to demonstrate how their activities contribute to decarbonization, ecosystem preservation, or the circular economy, echoing the classification logic of the Taxonomy. In this sense, the green rulebook functions as a definitional framework that indirectly guides the direction of EU-funded research, shaping innovation priorities even at the earliest stages of project conception. This creates a powerful “selection environment” (Nelson & Winter, 1982) that steers R&D toward Taxonomy-eligible pathways. The alignment also illustrates a broader pattern: the EU is using technical standards not just to regulate markets but to actively steer research and innovation trajectories, creating positive feedback loops between policy, funding, and technological development.

Yet, this function is dual-edged. While it creates momentum for aligned technologies (e.g., stimulating R&D in green hydrogen, which meets the Technical Screening Criteria (TSC)), it also risks creating path dependency. The novel classification system is in not only “opening up,” but also “closing down” innovation pathways (Stirling, 2008). Despite rhetoric about technology neutrality, the Taxonomy’s specific criteria inevitably privilege certain technical solutions over others. Technologies that are not (yet) recognized by the EU sustainability framework, or that represent a more radical departure from the status quo, may find it harder to attract funding and attention. Furthermore, the contentious inclusion of nuclear power demonstrates that achieving green rulebook alignment is a key strategy for technologies to secure long-term viability, influencing not just current investment but future R&D portfolios.

 

Conclusion: Classifications That Shape Futures

The EU Taxonomy’s journey from a narrow financial tool to a broad-based governance instrument reveals a core mechanism of modern economic steering: the use of technical standards to orchestrate complex transitions. This analysis has argued that the sustainability classification system’s power derives not from direct mandate but from its role as a constitutive framework – one that actively creates new realities and categories – that creates a coordinated selection environment. By providing a coherent and sanctioned guidance on sustainable activity, it aligns the incentives of investors, public banks, and industrial policymakers. This environment, in turn, shapes technological paradigms (Dosi, 1982), steering R&D and industrial strategy toward Taxonomy-aligned pathways.

Ultimately, the EU Taxonomy demonstrates that today governance is increasingly exercised through the quiet power of classification. The ongoing evolution of its TSC will therefore remain a central, and intensely political, process in determining the structure of the European green economy

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The Arctic is an exceptional venue for undisputed international cooperation against climate-induced threats. Due to this exceptionalism, it has long been an exceptional venue for undisputed international cooperation, i.e. ‘a zone of peace’. The contestations over the Arctic’s economic and security-related potential, however, seem to transform this region into a future Middle East.  While the region is under the dire pressure of climate-induced threats, the possibility of unlocking new opportunities for resource extraction and transport routes due to melting frost has fuelled the geopolitical race between major powers such as China and the EU.

Until the early 2010s, the EU and China disregarded each other in the Arctic due to the absence of a functional relationship. Due to its geographical position, the EU’s policy preferences have always been closely linked to the developments in its northern neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the Union’s regulatory influence, known as the Brussels effect, has been limited in Arctic affairs.  Moreover, the EU’s concerns over the involvement of a major power in the region were primarily about Russia. The 2007 headlines picturing the Russian flag on the Arctic seabed alarmed the Union against possible security implications of ‘the ongoing race for natural resources in the Arctic, which may lead to security threats for the EU and overall international instability’. Likewise, in those years, the Chinese interest in the region was primarily scientific. While China solidified its position as a key player in Arctic research through scientific expeditions in the late 1990s, Beijing maintained a low-key political approach, avoiding conflicts with the coastal states. By steering clear of sensitive topics like resource exploration, China was able to engage in constructive cooperation with these states.

Since the mid-2010s, however, the increasing presence of China in the Arctic has encouraged the EU to revise its Arctic policy. China’s shifting of its Arctic priorities towards the Barents, known to be the most prosperous sub-Arctic region in terms of resource endowment, has prompted the Union to add resource-related ambitions to the traditional pillars of its Arctic policy (fighting against climate change, scientific research and sustainability). In its 2012 joint communication on the Arctic region, the Commission stated that, as a priority within the scope of Raw Materials Strategy, the EU would ‘actively pursue a raw materials diplomacy with relevant Arctic states to secure access to raw materials notably through strategic partnerships and policy dialogues’.

China’s announcement of its Polar Silk Road plan in 2018 was another critical juncture. In its 2018 White Paper on Arctic strategy, China defined itself as a ‘Near-Arctic State’ as ‘one of the continental States closest to the Arctic Circle’. China also declared its objectives to include utilising Arctic resources (oil, gas, minerals, and other non-living resources) in a ‘lawful and rational manner’. Accordingly, Chinese policymakers focused on mineral resources while encouraging Chinese enterprises to explore and utilise Arctic resources. In this sense, their cooperation with Greenland for the mining operations in Kvanefjeld was a concrete example.

Beijing’s declaration of China as a ‘Near-Arctic State’ as well as its far-reaching projects and initiatives in the region, with the ambition of becoming a “polar power”, is seen as ‘cause of great concern’ by the EU. Particularly after the adoption of the European Green Deal and the subsequent strategies, such as the Clean Industrial Deal, China’s drive for Arctic resources has become a challenge for the EU’s green transition. The EU’s ambitious (internal) climate and energy policies are likely to have significant consequences with regard to its growing need for minerals essential for renewable energy technologies, batteries and the overall move towards more environmentally friendly operations. It is anticipated that there will be a substantial increase in the demand for numerous minerals extracted in the Arctic, and only Greenland possesses 25 per cent of the global reserves of rare earth minerals, which are essential to the transition of European industry.

Beijing’s drive for access to Arctic resources and strategic leverage in the region consequently has profound ramifications on the EU’s ability to deliver the European Green Deal. Particularly, the geopolitical competition over the extraction and flow of minerals becomes a matter of strategic autonomy for the EU. That is why, the Commission have occasionally raised concerns over the potential tensions that could ‘arise from competition in contested areas, such as space or the Arctic’. The concerns over China’s growing interest in the Arctic’s vast reserve of rare-earth minerals, ‘which would help the EU to reduce its dependency on China’, are shared by the other EU institutions. Indeed, strategic foresight studies reveal that the EU is overdependent on China for the supply for critical raw materials required particularly for the production and storage of solar and wind energy. Chinese firms’ dominance in the extraction and refining of these materials leaves minimal margin for supply diversification, making it more imperative for the EU to access Arctic resources.

All in all, the long-held perception of the Arctic as a peace zone is no longer valid. Rather, it has become an area for increasing rivalry, in which the EU’s economic security and strategic autonomy are at stake. In the context of the green (industrial) transition, the EU’s engagement in the Arctic matters has not only become ‘a geopolitical necessity’ to fulfil its ambitions, but also a matter of security. The tone of the EU’s current Arctic strategy reflects the EU’s security-related concerns over the ‘upturn in the activities of other actors, including China and growing interest in areas like ownership of critical infrastructure’. In this vein, the EU needs to revise its current Arctic policy based on pragmatic and strategic assessments. After all, navigating in a geopolitical race with a major power like China requires a more assertive and security-conscious approach to protect the Union’s vital interests in the High North.

 

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Blog article adapted from ‘Shadows of a Nation: History, Identity, and the Transnistrian Question’ working paper presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference at the Panteion University, Athens on 30 May 2025. Will Kingston-Cox is a political researcher and postgraduate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, specialising in Moldova, nationalism, and post-Soviet separatism.

Pridnestrovie[1] rarely makes international headlines. When it does, the region is reductively portrayed as a frozen conflict zone in Moldova’s eastern periphery, a relict quirk of Soviet collapse, or a pawn in Russia’s geopolitical manoeuvring. Since its de facto separation from Moldova in 1990, it has operated with its own borders, government, army, and currency, but without international recognition. To reduce Pridnestrovie simply to a geopolitical anomaly obscures the ways in which history, memory, and identity converge to produce a distinctive political community on Europe’s edge.

The war in Ukraine has once again thrown Pridnestrovie into sharper focus. Around 1,500 Russian “peacekeepers” remain stationed there, and the unresolved status of the territory consistently overshadows Moldova’s aspirations for closer integration with the European Union. In January 2025, a regional gas crisis starkly revealed Pridnestrovie’s vulnerability. When Ukraine halted the transit of Russian gas, the region, long dependent on Moscow’s subsidies and infrastructure, entered a severe humanitarian crisis. Heating, schools, and factories shut down. Yet it was not Russia but Moldova, supported by the EU, that assisted in with emergency gas supplies. For the first time, Pridnestrovie’s economic survival depended on its western neighbour rather than its eastern patron.

To understand why this mattered so profoundly, it is necessary to look at how Pridnestrovie’s identity has developed vis-a-vis Russia and Moldova across five formative historical episodes.

The first is rooted in the imperial period. The lands east of the Dniester River (today’s Pridnestrovie) were annexed by the Russian Empire in 1792, two decades before Russia also absorbed Bessarabia, the territory that would later become modern Moldova. Whereas Bessarabian identity was shaped through alternating Romanian, Ottoman, and Russian influences, Pridnestrovie’s trajectory was unambiguously Russian imperial. It was settled largely by Russian and Ukrainian populations and became a multiethnic Slavic frontier embedded firmly in imperial administration. By the late nineteenth century, Pridnestrovie functioned as a Russian stronghold against a culturally and linguistically Romanian Bessarabia.

The second episode came in 1924 with the establishment of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Far from recognising Moldovan distinctiveness, this was a calculated act of Soviet identity engineering. The MASSR was designed to manufacture a “Moldovan” nationality that would both counteract Romanian nationalism across the river and provide a justification for future Soviet claims to Bessarabia. A Cyrillic-script “Moldovan” language was institutionalised, Soviet cultural production reinforced the distinction, and loyal political cadres were installed. What emerged was an artificial but enduring sense of divergence between the left and right banks of the Dniester.

The third moment of rupture was the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1944, Romanian and Nazi German occupation transformed Pridnestrovie into a killing ground for Jews and Roma. More than 120,000 were deported, interned, or killed in ghettos and forced labour camps. While Moldova west of the Dniester also experienced wartime violence, Pridnestrovie’s direct subjection to Romanian rule created a distinct political memory. Romania became remembered as an aggressor, a narrative later reinforced by Soviet historiography and subsequently instrumentalised by Pridnestrovian elites in the 1990s. The memory of wartime occupation continues to shape identity today. When Moldova renamed its state language from “Moldovan” to “Romanian” in 2023, this was read in Tiraspol as confirmation of Moldova’s equation with Romania, a symbolic threat to the idea of Pridnestrovian separateness.

The fourth episode unfolded during the Soviet period. Pridnestrovie became the industrial powerhouse of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), producing an estimated 80 per cent of its industrial output. It hosted the Soviet 14th Army and was integrated into the wider Odessa Military District as a hub for heavy industry and arms production. The region attracted large-scale migration from Russia and Ukraine, diluting the proportion of ethnic Moldovans and reinforcing a multi-ethnic demographic profile. Politically, Pridnestrovians dominated: by 1989, no Bessarabian Moldovan had ever served as First Secretary of the Moldovan Communist Party. For many inhabitants, their livelihoods and identity were tied to the Soviet system.

Ultimately, the final rupture came in 1990–1992. Moldova’s nationalist turn, especially the elevation of Romanian language and symbols, was perceived on the left bank not as liberation but as existential threat. Pridnestrovian separatists mobilised to preserve their Soviet-era privileges and resist “Moldovanisation,” which they equated with Romanian unification. The war claimed over 3,000 lives and ended with a ceasefire in July 1992 that left Moldova without control over Pridnestrovie. Since then, the self-proclaimed Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) has existed as a de facto state. Its institutions are entrenched, but it remains internationally unrecognised.

The central question today is whether this de facto state has also generated a nation. Evidence suggests that it has, though in contested and pragmatic forms. Identity is cultivated through the memorialisation of the 1992 war, the memory of Romanian occupation, and loyalty to the PMR’s institutions. It is multiethnic by necessity: Russians, Ukrainians, and Moldovans coexist under the shared label of “Pridnestrovian.” As one young respondent explained: “I call myself Pridnestrovian because I was born here, but what does that actually mean?” Belonging is shaped less by ethnicity than by residence, political loyalty, and a sense of historical separation from Moldova.

This produces a paradoxical identity. On the surface it is inclusive, but it is also forged through trauma and external dependence. The PMR promotes itself as a multiethnic national polity, yet Russia sustains the system through subsidies, media influence, and symbolic gestures, whilst avoiding the step of formal recognition or annexation. As Moldova pursues its European trajectory and wrestles with its own divided polity over identity and geopolitical alignment, it is wholly conceivable that the ambiguity of Pridnestrovian identity and the longstanding unsettled political conflict will be reconciled. The unresolved conflict is not only a question of borders or recognition, but of competing identities and contested pasts: shadows that continue to shape Europe’s eastern edge.

[1] Pridnestrovie is the endonym for the region commonly known as Transnistria in English

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The 2025 edition the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, 26-29 August. These were four intense days of thousands of participants exploring most pressing political issues of our times over a range of featured roundtables and hundreds of panels. The conference section of the ECPR Knowledge Politics and Policies standing group included 9 panels on topics such as politics and policies of academic freedom, higher education, universities, science diplomacy and Artificial Intelligence. Our standing groups also contributed to the featured panels of the conference on ‘Rethinking AI in research’, ‘Academic Freedom under Pressure’ and ‘Academic Freedom and Political Science in Challenging Times’.

 

This was the 14th time that our Knowledge Politics and Policies Standing Group organized a section at the ECPR general conferences and the 10th anniversary since we participate as a Standing Group since we were established in early 2016. Over the years, our Standing Group has provided a forum for engaging discussions, collaborations and networking. Currently we have over 270 members. This year the ECPR requires the renewal of standing group membership. To remain our member or to join us, please head to ‘MyECPR’ to ‘My Groups’ and renew your membership by 30 September. To have a glimpse of rich discussions in our Knowledge Politics and Policies section in Thessaloniki, please have a look at the panel summaries written by panel chairs.

 

University Alliances

Chaired by Andrew Gunn and Marina Cino Pagliarello the Comparing University Alliances panel featured four presentations. The papers all considered the European Universities Initiative (EUI) and highlighted the importance of national contexts within the study of this supranational scheme, the role of institutions and the wider political agendas at work.

 

The first papers addressed the challenges of realising Quality Assurance at multilateral university alliance level. The Concept of Quality Assurance in European University Alliances: Same Old or Innovative Transformation? presented by Daniela Craciun and Institutionalisation and Jointness of Purpose-Driven Transnational Higher Education Networks by Mark Frederiks. These presentations unpacked the practicalities of alliance operation. When building a new multilateral alliance, the earlier phase of setting out grand visions and vistas is followed by the hard work of making this happen on the ground. This is the difficult and technical part of alliance building. The research presented illustrated the diversity in frameworks and the legal and regulatory barriers for cooperation. Daniela Crăciun argued that quality should neither be imposed or taken for granted, but allow for diversity and flexibility to promote innovation, while Mark Fredericks posed the questions of weather merely replacing ‘institutions’ with ‘alliances’ in quality documents is sufficient.

 

In a change of theme, the paper Avoiding Peripheralisation: Swiss and British HEIs Participation in the EUI by Antonin Charret and Agata Lambrechts provided a reminder that not all EUI alliances are in the EU. This highlights importance of the nation state and need to consider what happens there. The research explained how there are both institutional and national drivers for Swiss and British universities to join and sustain engagement with EUI alliances

 

In the final paper EUI as Sociotechnical Imaginaries: A Constructivist Analysis of the EELISA alliance, Merve Çalımlı Akgün considered the political purpose of the EUI. The analysis explored how the EU positions EUI alliances as non-state actors that promote liberal and democratic values, drive green and digital transformations, and enhance sustainable economic prosperity for a resilient Europe. It considered how the EU’s higher education imaginary is expressed in alliances, tracing how these imaginaries are enacted from EU policy frameworks to institutional strategies and everyday life.

 

Internationalization of Higher Education

In the panel ‘Internationalization of Higher Education: Exploring (Geo)political and Policy Developments’, Anatoly Oleksiyenko (Education University of Hong Kong) provided a rich account of the complex impacts of Russia’s aggressive war upon the internationalization of Ukrainian institutions. While faculty are working, and students studying, under profoundly onerous conditions, online learning, the large number of Ukrainian women hosted abroad in foreign universities, and strong expressions of solidarity from many HEIs abroad also presented strategic opportunities. In the keen discussion that followed, the role of the war in giving cognitive salience abroad to Ukrainian HEIs, but also the varied degree of solidarity, and also uncertainty about its longevity, were explored.

 

Ann-Kristin Matthé (Maastricht University) presented illuminating comparative research from her doctoral work on the extent to which, and means by how, German and Dutch HEIs seek to influence policy and resourcing priorities of national, regional and EU public institutions with responsibility for internationalisation initiatives. The research is innovative and important; making the HEI the core unit of analysis, and looking at varieties of university-level actorhood in endeavouring to shape the policy and funding environment to serve their own priorities. Agency the individual professor level, and the limited authority of German rectors to steer faculties were discussed, stimulating a lively dialogue with session participants.

 

Synne Lysberg (Universitetet i Bergen) presented an engaging paper based on her doctoral work that established her theoretical construct and method in analysing how Norwegian higher education institutions have responded strategically to the introduction of performance agreements from 2016, and to which all HEIs are subject to renewal in 2022. The imposition of a system of performance agreements typically represents a state attempt to foster a diversity of institutions and offerings, although may also give rise to unintended pressures for homogenization as some institutions draw legitimacy from resembling other established HEIs. Synne draws on a framework from Oliver (1991) to categorise the tactical and strategic options that HEIs subject to performance agreements in a state dominated system. The research promises to be very illuminative not only of the Norwegian case but offer lessons for the implementation of performance agreements in other higher education systems.

 

Christopher Pokarier (Waseda University) presented on how populist politics in the lead-up to a recent nation election saw heavy scapegoating of full-fee paying international students for contributed to a perceived housing crisis, and universities ostensibly losing their ‘social license’ through heavy reliance on international student revenues. This politics manifested in a both Government and opposition supporting the capping of international student numbers; despite potentially severe financial impacts on HEIs. This unprecedented reversal of a hitherto laissez-faire policy, since the late 1980s. Inclusion of international students in net migration numbers, which suggested post-covid, contributed to community unease, fuelled then by political entrepreneurship.

 

Higher Education Policy Actors Between Tradition and New Modes of Governance

The panel on “Policy Actors in Higher Education Between Conservation of Traditional HE Values and Engagement in New Modes of Governance” chaired by Agata Lambrechts brought together a diverse set of papers examining how different actors—from students to institutions—are navigating the complex, and often conflicting, demands of the contemporary higher education landscape. The studies highlighted how these actors defend traditional humanistic values, how they navigate conflicting sets of pressures and expectations, as well as how they engage in new modes of governance across levels and countries.

 

The challenge of upholding traditional values in a changing environment was a central theme. Cláudia Figueiredo’s paper co-authored with colleagues from Universidade de Aveiro, explored the tensions between humanistic values and the rise of managerialism in Portuguese universities. Content analysis of six universities’ strategic plans revealed the struggle to reconcile the pursuit of knowledge for its intrinsic value with the growing emphasis on market-driven concerns, such as viewing students as “clients.” The study provides insight into how institutions attempt to strike a balance between academic integrity and the demands of efficiency and financial constraints.

 

At the same time, the panel explored how actors are embracing new governance frameworks. Agata Lambrechts’s paper, co-authored with Marcelo Marques and Lukas Graf, analysed how global grand societal challenges function as a transnational governance tool within EU education and training policy. By examining the European Universities Initiative (EUI) and the Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs), the research showed how these challenges justify new forms of policy experimentation and institutional arrangements, signalling a shift in how EU policy is steered and legitimised.

 

Nadia Manzoni

A key focus of the discussion was also the emergence of new organisational actors. Giuseppe Lipari’s paper traced the rise of the Global Student Forum (GSF), a democratic, representative student entity. He detailed how the GSF is carving out a role within a decentralised global higher education policy framework, leveraging its “legitimate power” to influence decision-making processes. His work highlights a new era of global student representation after decades without a unified voice. Similarly, Nadia Manzoni’s research examines the recently established FOREU4ALL Community of Practice, an organisation that represents all EUI alliances. Manzoni’s paper defined this community as an emergent international organisation that is fostering a kind of “sideway Europeanisation.” Her analysis of this new actor’s role in promoting social learning and peer pressure among Member States demonstrated a new, non-hierarchical mechanism for domestic policy change.

 

Collectively, these papers provided a nuanced view and underscored the dynamic interplay between different values and the evolving role of policy actors in shaping the future of higher education in Europe and globally.

 

 

Science diplomacy

The panel ‘Science Diplomacy: New Directions and Areas of Study’ took a broad approach to science diplomacy, addressing a range of actor types that are less prevalent in the literature – industry, universities, and early career scientists. With a paper on ‘Diplomatic Practice in Silicon Valley’ Kristin Eggeling of University of Copenhagen explored the relationship between science diplomacy and tech diplomacy in an ethnographically-grounded paper that focused on state-firm relations in California. The paper also drew interest for its revisiting of Susan Strange’s conceptual work. Luis Junior from University of Coimbra presented on ‘Epistemological Security in the Global South: the BRICS Academic Forum’. His paper applied this new concept bridging harder-edged IR on security with knowledge-based policy concepts to explore the unique case of scientists’ role in agenda setting for the BRICS.

 

The role of early career scientists was explored in the following two papers. Valentina Gruarin of the Università di Catania presented her paper on ‘Youth Expertise and Science Diplomacy: Framing Regional Knowledge Spillovers for Policy Innovation in EU-MENA relations’ and Tatyana Bajenova of European University Institute presented on ‘The Involvement of Young Stakeholders in Science Diplomacy at National, European and Global Levels: the Case of Switzerland’. Both papers showed the increasing role of young scientists in the practice of science diplomacy. The final paper, ‘Science Diplomacy and Foreign Interference in the EU’, by Mitchell Young of Charles University focused on the ways universities are addressing research security and how that can elucidate a shift in their societal dynamics. There was lively discussion and questions, and as always, too little time.

 

How Do Universities Die?

The panel “How do universities die?”, chaired by Alexander Mitterle and Roland Bloch (both Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg) addressed organizational conditions under which universities and their programmes survive or fail. Alexander Mitterle focused on the higher education sector with the highest death toll: the private. Tracing the life trajectories of all German private universities since 1945, he discussed the environmental changes and the deregistration of roughly a third of the sector. Yet, despite this volatility, he showed that most universities persisted in different forms: with its multiple bodies the private university left multiple chalk outlines on site but exposing a high level of adaptability was rather difficult to kill.

 

Roland Bloch returned to his work on the extraordinary expansion of the graduate school model in Germany due to the excellence initiative, in a system dominated by the master-discipline-relationship. With the end of the funding line and no money to gain, the school concept had no driver. Would it die? Bloch shows a large number of schools survived. Only those built around a common topic lost their founders’ interest, mostly quickly. Umbrella and graduate schools funded by the excellence initiative overwhelmingly survived. It appears ceremony and status decrease the risk of death. Overall, the graduate schools seem to have passed their tipping point for German graduate education: it is doomed to survive.

 

Hannah Mohrmann discussed the rise of helping professions in higher education as a murder mystery. While for some the increasing administrative and supportive burdens in universities are subverting and “killing academia”, others see them as the stabilising force to counter rising internal complexity. The case is complex: structural changes in higher education have led to severe reorganisation in and outside of academia. Helping professions act as support for the myriad deficits academics face – from emotional control to resilience – providing guidance and empowerment. They thus might improve survival or at least pave the way into academic afterlife. In crafting and refining evaluative criteria and the means of success, they, however, also increasingly co-define how death and survival look like.

 

Artificial Intelligence and Power

Inga Ulnicane

For the sixth year in a row, our section included a panel on Artificial Intelligence. Since 2020, this panel has led to many impactful publications on AI policy, governance and politics, and created a network of researchers working on these topics. The topic this year ‘Demystifying Power In/ of Artificial Intelligence‘ again attracted a lot of interest. In the first talk, Inga Ulnicane discussed multiple meanings of the term governance in interdisciplinary literature on AI governance that often prioritizes technocratic and technical approaches of governance and tends to neglect its political and power aspects. In their paper on policy instrumentation in platform governance, Ville Aula and Meng-Hsuan Chou compared recent regulatory initiatives in the European Union and Singapore to study the evolving social contract between the state, people and market.

 

The paper by Tero Erkkilä, Juho Mölsä and Ville Aula focussed on the role of ombudsmen and new regulatory bodies in overseeing AI. By studying how different EU member states implement the EU AI Act’s requirement about oversight, they identified a range of approaches such as centralized and sectoral, with Ombusmen having a key role especially in centralized models. Last but not least, Konstantinos Kostas presented his research on the Finnish approach to human-centric AI, focusing on broad and intricate history of human-centricity as a policy concept in Finland since World War II. In the following discussion, the four papers raised a lot of questions on emerging good practices in AI governance, the role of democracy, and the influence of EU AI policy accross the world. We will keep working on these and other questions in this fast developing area. If you would like to collaborate, please let us know.

 

Migration-Higher Education Policy Nexus

Chaired by Alina Felder-Stindt (University of St. Gallen) and Meng-Hsuan Chou (Singapore University), the panel “The Politics of Migration-Higher Education Policy Nexus” examined the complex interplay between migration and higher education policies in the context of global skills shortages. The panel explored how different political, institutional, and economic actors (fail to) coordinate when designing policies that aim to attract and retain highly skilled individuals. One key theme was the influence of tuition fee structures and student support policies on international student mobility, particularly across OECD countries (Zhamilya Mukasheva, LSE). Another was the concept of “edugration,” which refers to the geopolitical dynamics that emerge when education and migration governance become intertwined (Eva Hartmann, University of Cambridge).

 

The panel also discussed internal migration patterns among educators, using Italy as a case study to show how teacher mobility affects higher education reform. Additionally, it examined how university rankings shape migration governance, influencing both institutional strategies and student choices (Astrid Favella, Sapienza University of Rome). Finally, the panel presented empirical findings on why immigrants tend to prefer academic education, drawing on a factorial survey experiment conducted among students in the Canton of Vaud (Kousha Vahidi, Université de Lausanne). The discussion by Tero Erkkilä (University of Helsinki) showed how together, these contributions offered a rich, comparative perspective on how migration and higher education policies co-evolve, revealing both synergies and tensions in the pursuit of high-skilled labor.

 

Interest Organizations

The panel “Interest Organizations in Knowledge Politics and Policies” focused on the role of interest organizations in shaping knowledge policy, particularly within the higher education sector. The discussions examined how these organizations represent diverse stakeholder interests, engage in policy formulation, and navigate complex institutional environments. Alberto Márquez-Carrascal’s (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) – The Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)) contribution analyzed the role of advocacy coalitions in shaping higher education policy in Madrid, particularly during times of institutional crisis. It showed how universities and allied actors mobilize to influence policy outcomes.

 

Alina Felder-Stindt’s (University of St. Gallen) paper examined the European Universities Initiative, illustrating how project-based approaches serve as pilots for broader EU higher education policy development. The paper by Michael Oduro Asante and Martina Vukasovic (Universitetet i Bergen) investigated leadership dynamics within interest group networks, focusing on how intra- and intersectoral career changes of interest group leaders in the field of education. Together, these studies offered a rich and multifaceted view of how interest organizations develop their policy agendas, emphasizing the strategic choices they make in response to shifting political and economic contexts. It also addressed how these organizations relate to their members, highlighting the importance of internal governance structures and operational dynamics in sustaining legitimacy and influence.

 

Academic freedom

Academic freedom is a topic with increasing salience. From being a norm often referred to but rarely discussed in detail, academic freedom has now become an important policy issue in Europe – both national and European level. In parallel, academic freedom is also gaining increasing scholarly attention. The latter was also illustrated by the fact that ECPR organized two large roundtables on the issue where members from the Knowledge Politics and Policies Standing Group were represented. At the Knowledge Politics and Policies Section, the panel on academic freedom was packed, with five presentations on Friday afternoon. Despite the placement at the very end of the conference, the panel attracted a lively debate on current issues and provided a number of interesting insights on current challenges.

 

In their paper, Mari Elken, Jens Jungblut and Peter Maassen examined how and why academic freedom has obtained such a prominent place on European level policy debates. The paper analyses how policy coordination takes place at multiple policy arenas – The Council of Europe, The EU Commission and the European Parliament, as well as the Bologna Follow Up Group (BFUG). The paper highlighted the pivotal role of the Central European University case, and shows how ongoing policy initiatives in this area on European level are not fully coordinated, but have contributed to the issue keeping momentum.

 

Daniela Craciun and Marcelo Marques presented their work in analysing how the worrying trends concerning erosion of academic freedom are reflected in the news coverage on academic freedom in higher education from University World News (UWN). Utilizing automated text analysis and structural topic modelling, the analysis showed an overall  increase in reporting on academic freedom between 2007-2025, with a notable increase in the last decade. Coverage has been geographically diverse, and the scope of reporting has expanded from isolated incidents to broader global and systemic concerns. Central themes include the erosion of academic freedom and the risks faced by the academic community when they dissent or challenge political and institutional authorities.

 

In the third paper, Christiane Thompson presented her ongoing work on the state of academic freedom in Germany with an analysis of “the protection” of the university, utilizing both interview data with various stakeholders and university staff, as well as documents around controversial cases including statements and press releases. The analysis showcased recent discursive attacks on the universities as “safe spaces” and how this in itself has lead to attempts to regulate academic speech.

 

Vasiliki Kosta and Olga Ceran put focus on a key piece of legislation on European level – namely the Art. 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights which deals with academic freedom. In the paper they build on their work done in the AFITE project and analyse whether there are limits to commercialization of academia due to Art.13 CFR.  The analysis points to different channels of commercialization and how other policy fields may have spillover effects and raises questions of the role of EU law in national higher education laws and policies.

 

In the final presentation, Anne van Wageningen positioned academic freedom as “oxygen” for higher education institutions to operate. He emphasizes the need for precision when discussing academic freedom, and clear distinction between freedom of speech and institutional academic freedom. By looking into the legal relationship between institutional academic freedom and government influence in four countries as well as EU and Council of Europe, the analysis explores different ways in which academic freedom is safeguarded.

 

Standing Group Business Meeting

At our Standing Group Business meeting we discussed our past and future activities. Among other things, we celebrated our 2024 Knowledge Politics and Policies Standing Group excellent paper award from an emerging scholar which has been awarded to Anna-Lena Rüland (University College London) for her paper ‘“We Need a CERN for AI”: Organized Scientific Interests and Agenda-Setting in European Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy’. Soon the call will be out for the next round of the excellent paper award, stay tuned. The next 2026 ECPR General Conference will take place at Jagiellonian University Krakow in Poland from 8-11 September. If you would like to be part of our section there or any other of our activities, please join us and get in touch!

The post ECPR Knowledge Politics and Policies 2025 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Mari Carlson (University of Helsinki)

The European Green Deal marked a bold attempt to confront the environmental crisis – not merely through environmental policy, but across the full spectrum of internal and external governance. Trade policy, in particular, underwent an unprecedented wave of greening. Yet before the ink had dried, the Covid-19 pandemic and successive geopolitical shocks plunged the Union into deeper turbulence. This sparked a profound reorientation of the logics guiding EU trade policy.

In this shifting landscape, EU farmers found themselves caught between a liberalised trade regime and a rising tide of environmental regulation. As geopolitical tensions mounted, farmers across the EU protested what they perceived as unfair competition, compounded by a lack of adequate protective measures. At the same time, trading partners accused the EU of veering towards green protectionism, casting doubt on the legitimacy of its normative trade posture.

In my recent article for the Journal of Common Market Studies, I explore this contradiction. Was EU agricultural trade policy becoming more unilateral and geopolitically driven under the European Green Deal, potentially levelling the playing field for EU farmers? And if so, why were farmers still contesting it?

Legitimising Trade through Environmental Othering

Under the European Green Deal, the EU’s agri-food trade policy underwent a comprehensive normative overhaul, backed by a robust enforcement toolkit. This was not simply a technical adjustment in trade mechanics. It marked a deliberate strategic shift, driven by the perception that global governance had failed to adequately respond to the environmental crisis.

The European Commission actively elevated the Union’s environmental agenda, asserting its leadership on the global stage. It portrayed the EU as a principled guardian of sustainability, legitimising its trade posture through normative ambition rather than market logic. Central to this strategy was what I term environmental othering. Trading partners were not depicted as bad trade actors but as environmentally irresponsible ones. This reframing enabled the EU’s environmental agri-food trade measures to appear morally justified rather than protectionist.

To reinforce its normative stance, the Commission leaned heavily on the EU’s reputation for high food safety and animal welfare standards. Moreover, the EU’s new sustainability model was presented as a global benchmark and the solution to the global environmental crisis, while marginalising other countries’ food systems by portraying them as unsustainable or in need of improvement.

In this way, the environmental crisis was framed as a shared global threat, but one that subtly positioned others as inferior. This logic of depoliticisation, previously seen in EU climate adaptation discourse, was repurposed within the trade-agriculture nexus to justify assertive and unilateral action.

Geopoliticising Agri-Food Trade in the EU’s Strategic Turn

The transformation of EU agri-food trade policy reflects a broader strategic shift in how the Union approaches trade governance. Under the logic of open strategic autonomy, trade policy is no longer primarily guided by economic principles or the pursuit of the common good. Instead, it is shaped by geopolitical imperatives, normative ambition, and long-term strategic foresight.

This geopoliticisation of trade is steadily displacing multilateral cooperation and long-standing commitments to trade liberalisation. The Commission’s deployment of enhanced enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, and unilateral sustainability-linked measures signals a decisive departure from its historically cooperative posture.

My analysis explores how the Commission has sought to normalise and depoliticise contentious trade measures, even when these risk contravening multilateral trade rules. The deployment of legally targeted justification strategies does not necessarily reflect confidence or assertiveness. Rather, such narratives serve to mask internal tensions and pre-empt external contestation. By presenting its actions as both legally sound and environmentally principled, the Commission consolidates the EU’s normative stance while sidestepping direct confrontation with trading partners.

The boundary between trade and foreign policy is steadily dissolving, as strategic interests reshape the rules of engagement. Within this shifting terrain, the EU’s role as a firm supporter of multilateralism grows increasingly difficult to sustain. My analysis argues that the Union’s revised approach to agri-food trade risks accelerating global fragmentation and entrenching a broader trend towards rising unilateralism.

While the EU’s assertive turn has elevated its profile as a geoeconomic actor, the persistence of farmer resistance exposes unresolved domestic contradictions. These tensions reveal that the Union’s external ambitions are not always underpinned by internal consensus, particularly when domestic stakeholders feel marginalised by the pace and trajectory of change. Moreover, when policy shifts remain largely discursive rather than materially transformative, their impact on sectoral realities tends to be limited.

Level Playing Field or Uneven Terrain?

The European Green Deal is not the first instance of the EU seeking to level the regulatory playing field in agriculture. For nearly three decades, it has championed the integration of multifunctional objectives, including sustainability, biodiversity, and food security, into the architecture of trade rules. As multilateral negotiations faltered, the Union pivoted towards bilateral agreements, offering a more pragmatic channel for advancing these aims. Yet such deals often came at a cost: the more regulated party, typically the EU, faced pressure to concede unless its counterpart agreed to raise standards, a concession that seldom materialised.

Agricultural cost structures vary significantly across countries due to differences in climate, labour costs, subsidies, and regulatory frameworks. These disparities make uniform liberalisation structurally implausible. Neoliberal trade logic assumes that markets can reallocate resources efficiently, but this overlooks the strategic, environmental, and social dimensions of agriculture.

This imbalance continues to fuel claims of unfair competition, especially as the European Green Deal was raising environmental ambition without securing equivalent commitments from trading partners. At the heart of this tension lies a fundamental incompatibility between the agricultural sector and the neoliberal trade regime. Agricultural markets are shaped by distinct cost structures and strategic imperatives that resist the logic of liberalisation.

As the EU strengthens environmental and health regulations and reasserts food self-sufficiency as a national security priority, the traditional trade paradigm becomes increasingly untenable. Even as the Commission pursues more assertive and geopolitically attuned trade policies to advance broader foreign policy objectives, these efforts fall short of addressing the domestic and global pressures that continue to destabilise the system. Farmers, burdened by compliance costs, and civil society groups, demanding stronger global sustainability norms, both continue to challenge the legitimacy of the neoliberal trade model. The level playing field, while rhetorically powerful, remains a utopian concept – one that obscures deeper asymmetries in global trade.

Mari Carlson is a doctoral grant researcher in the Doctoral Programme in Sustainable Use of Renewable Natural Resources at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on EU trade and agricultural policy through the lens of geopolitics and environmental sustainability. Her work is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Website: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/mari-carlson

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Author:

Sarah de Heer is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law at Lund University. In her doctoral research, she examines the impact of AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine on the right to health in Sweden. More specifically, Sarah scrutinises to which extent the conformity assessment procedure, which allows medical devices to be placed on the internal market of the European Union, can safeguard the quality pillar under the right to health. Sarah’s doctoral research is funded by Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS).

Imagine the following: you visit your General Practitioner, as you are experiencing unexplained weight loss and belly pain that spreads to the back. Your General Practitioner decides to test your blood by using an AI-driven medical device in precision medicine that predicts the likelihood of pancreatic cancer. Based on your blood sample, demonstrating a high likelihood of pancreatic cancer, the multidisciplinary team suggests starting chemotherapy. Since multiple combinations of various medicinal drugs can be included in the chemotherapy treatment plan, the tumour in your pancreas is tested with another AI-driven medical device in precision medicine to determine the drug sensitivity of the medicinal products. Based on these results, you are given the medicinal products that have showed high sensitivity and are expected to give you the best results. After treatment, the tumour appears to be in remission.

The above scenario appears to be promising: quicker and more accurate diagnosis and treatment thanks to the combination of precision medicine and AI. While precision medicine modifies healthcare diagnosis and treatment towards the data of an individual belonging to a specific (sub)group of the general population, this tailored approach of medicine is time-consuming and costly. Adding AI allows precision medicine to become faster and more scalable. However, the addition of AI – while undoubtedly revolutionary for the healthcare sector – has its own disadvantages stemming from their inherent characteristics of AI, which includes inaccuracy. The question then becomes: what if the AI-driven medical device in precision medicine is inaccurately trained, which leads to incorrect output? Going back to the scenario: imagine that AI-driven medical devices incorrectly predict that you do not have cancer or recommend a cancer treatment that does not suit you best and actually results in severe and irreversible side effects.

Unfortunately, this is not an unlikely scenario. To train an AI-driven medical device in precision medicine to identify, for instance, pancreatic cancer requires the training, validation, and testing datasets to be complete and accurate. While this is a particularly demanding task, it is a vital one to ensure the health of all individuals of the population. If the datasets, upon which the AI-driven medical device in precision medicine were to be trained, only include data of certain segments of the population, this would result in enhancing the health of individuals similar to the datasets but leaving individuals belonging to different demographics behind. Consequently, the overall health of some individuals may be improved, while simultaneously deteriorate for others. As such, the right to health may either be enhanced or be impeded depending on whether the individual resembles the dataset used.

The right to health, a fundamental right, rests upon four pillars, namely 1) availability, 2) accessibility, 3) acceptability, and 4) quality.[1] While AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine may both positively and negatively affect the pillars of availability, accessibility and acceptability, this doctoral project specifically scrutinises the quality pillar of the right to health. However, quality is not a fixed standard with a clear interpretation or methodology. Rather, seeing the ever-changing nature of medical science and legal requirements[2], the notion ‘quality’ is a moving target that is continuously evolving.[3] Moreover, as the interpretation of quality hinges on the context in which it is used, there is no sole global interpretation. Zooming in on the European Union, the provision of health care should be – amongst others – safe and effective.[4]

In short, the safety aspect of quality requires that healthcare materials, including AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine, should not harm or inflict avoidable injuries.[5]  The effective requirement under the quality pillar entails that the provision of health care should be based on evidence[6] and is aimed at improving an individual’s health condition[7]. Both the safety and effectiveness of AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine hinges heavily upon the datasets used for training, testing and validation.

To ensure the safety and effectiveness of medical devices that are placed on the internal market of the European Union, the manufacturer needs to successfully complete the conformity assessment procedure under the Medical Devices Regulation[8]. Further, the Artificial Intelligence Act complements the conformity assessment procedure, where the medical device includes an AI component.[9] Thus, the regulatory framework consisting of the conformity assessment procedure of AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine comprises the Medical Devices Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Act. Under the conformity assessment procedure, the manufacturer needs to submit evidence demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of their AI-driven medical device in precision medicine to a third party, namely the Notified Body.[10]

During the conformity assessment procedure, this so-called ‘conformity assessment body’ reviews the evidence submitted by the manufacturer. These Notified Bodies issue certifications indicating the conformity of the requirements as indicated in the Medical Devices Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Act.[11] As such, Notified Bodies are indispensable in verifying the evidence attesting the safety and effectiveness of AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine. After having successfully completed the conformity assessment procedure, the manufacturer may draw up the EU Declaration of Conformity[12] and affix the AI-driven medical device in precision medicine with the CE marking[13]. Both demonstrate the compliance with EU Law, including the provisions on safety and effectiveness. Thus, the EU Declaration of Conformity – and consequently the CE marking – bring along a significant legal assumption.[14]

However, the question is to which extent can the manufacturer provide evidence attesting the safety and effectiveness of an AI-driven medical device in precision medicine? Let alone, to which extent can the Notified Body accurately examine the evidence submitted by the manufacturer of the AI-driven medical device in precision medicine? Seeing the inaccuracy surrounding AI, the manufacturer and the Notified Body are faced with an immense task, as they are tasked to ensure the pillar ‘quality’ under the right of health of AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine, thereby enhancing the health of individuals of all demographics of the population.

In short, the use of AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine may lead to quicker and more accurate health care. Their use, however, brings along challenges, especially caused by training AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine with improper datasets that may – for instance – be incomplete or not representative. This may lead to enhancing the pillar ‘quality’ under the right to health of those individuals who represent the datasets, while simultaneously leading to a decline of the pillar ‘quality’ of those individuals who do not resemble the datasets. Moreover, the four pillars, ‘availability’, ‘accessibility’, ‘acceptability’, and ‘quality’ are interlinked. This means that enhancing quality may also positively affect the other pillars. The other side of medal, however, is that a decline in quality may have a negative impact on the other pillars ‘availability’, ‘accessibility’, and ‘acceptability’. As such, individuals matching the datasets may experience an overall increase of their right to health, while individuals not mirroring the datasets may see their overall right to health backsliding.

Thus, there is a need for caution when implementing AI-driven medical devices in precision medicine in the healthcare sector. Specifically, it is vital that the regulatory regime is fit to address the problems associated with faulty datasets. Furthermore, Notified Body – in its capacity of overseeing the conformity assessment procedure – ought to be given the tools to ensure that quality, and thus the overall right to health, is enhanced for not only a selective group of the population but for everyone.

 

[1] Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, CESCR General Comment No. 14: The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health (Art. 12) (Document E/C.12/2000/4), para. 12.

[2] Santa Slokenberga, ‘The standard of care and implications for paediatric decision-making. The Swedish viewpoint’ in Clayton Ó Néill and others (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Health Rights (Taylor & Francis Group 2021) 122, 128.

[3] Alicia Ely Yamin, ‘The right to health’ in Jackie Dugard, Bruce Porter and Daniela Ikawa, Research Handbook on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights As Human Rights (Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2020) 159, 162-163.

[4] Additionally, the provision of healthcare should also 1) patient-centred, 2) timely, 3) efficient, and 4) equitable. Institute of Medicine, Crossing the Quality Chasm. A New Health System for the 21st Century (National Academy Press 2001), 39-40.

[5] European Commission, Future EU agenda on quality of health care with a special emphasis on patient safety (Publications Office 2014), 25-26.

[6] Helen Hughes, ‘Patient Safety and Human Rights’ in Clayton Ó Néill and others (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Health Rights (Taylor & Francis Group 2021) 259, 261.

[7] European Commission, Future EU agenda on quality of health care with a special emphasis on patient safety (Publications Office 2014), 25-26.

[8] For more information about the conformity assessment procedure of medical devices, please see Article 52 Medical Devices Regulation.

[9] For more information about the conformity assessment procedure for AI systems, please see Article 43 Artificial Intelligence Act.

[10] Article 53 Medical Devices Regulation and Article 43 Medical Devices Regulation.

[11] Article 56 Medical Devices Regulation and Points 3.2 and 4.6, subpara. 2 Annex VII Artificial Intelligence Act.

[12] Article 10(6) Medical Devices Regulation.

[13] Article 20(1) Medical Devices Regulation.

[14] Article 19(1) Medical Devices Regulation.

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