The Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) and the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) hosted three intensive days of experts and policy-planners exchange during October and December 2020. The opening discussion including keynotes from Tytti Tuppurainen, Minister for European Affairs and Ownership Steering, Prime Minister’s Office, Finland and Michael Roth, Minister of State for Europe, Federal Foreign Office, Germany held on 27 October is available as a recording here. The newly published Discussion Paper draws on discussions from the 2020 German-Nordic-Baltic Forum and is authored by Juha Jokela, Funda Tekin, Niklas Helwig, Vittoria Meissner, Marco Siddi and Tyyne Karjalainen.
Strategic autonomy, economic recovery and climate policy should rank high on the EU agenda after the Covid-19 crisis, researchers and policy-planners from the Baltic-Nordic region and Germany argue in the newly released Discussion Paper ”2020 as a stress test for the European Union: Challenges in times of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Along with the pandemic and its social and economic impacts, burning challenges to the Union include wavering of the multilateral world order and the rules-based global trading system, in addition to the increasing pressure of the global climate chance. At the same time, internal challenges such as the hardship with rule of law in some member states, Brexit, and the fragilities of EU supply chains call for both Union-level and regional cooperation. To increase EU’s resilience and strategic autonomy, flexible alliances of the member states as well as increasingly strategic approach to multilateral cooperation will be required.
