As a member of a research consortium of 15 distinguished research institutes and universities, FIIA has secured funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 framework programme for a large scale research project examining differentiated integration in the EU. The project is coordinated by Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome, and it will run from 2019 to 2021.
The key assumption of this project is that the evolution of the EU’s politics and policies has demonstrated that differentiation can no longer be treated as an anomaly in the integration process. This poses a set of questions to academic and policy-makers alike: whether, how much and what form of differentiation is not only compatible with but also conducive to a more effective, cohesive and democratic EU.
FIIA is taking the lead on Work Package 5, which will focus on differentiated integration in the field of foreign, security and defence policies. FIIA’s contribution builds on the previous work carried out in the institute on the report Multi-Speed Europe: Differentiated integration in the external relations of the EU (2014) and it will enable FIIA to strengthen its profile in this field of EU studies.
