Fachkonferenz
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ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
Over the last fifty years Europe went through a unique historical process of economic and political integration, something which could not be expected during the tragic first half of the 20th century. The last fifteen years brought remarkable progress in this respect. Launching the Single European Market and the common currency (the Euro) significantly deepened the earlier, mostly trade-related integration. The newly adopted Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe gives a chance not only to consolidate the previous integration accomplishments but also make Union more efficient. The subsequent enlargements, including the last and biggest one, which increased the number of member states from 15 to 25, strengthened an economic and geopolitical importance of the EU. Most of Europe's nations and population are already inside the EU.
Several other countries are either already engaged in various stages of EU accession (Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Croatia) or would like to join this process in the not so distant future (Western Balkans and Western CIS). We believe that no European nation can be denied the right to participate in European integration and that the future EU borders will move further to the East and South East.
In spite of the obvious integration successes, the European economy and European institutions face a number of serious challenges. The biggest European economies are close to stagnation and Europe as a whole is losing in competition with the US, Asia and Pacific region. The implementation of the Lisbon Agenda, an ambition EU program to revitalize the European economy and make it the most competitive and innovative region in the world, has fallen short of original expectations so far. The EU fiscal discipline rules have been notoriously breached. The crisis of the welfare state is going to deepen in the future as a result of the aging of the population. The EU decision-making process is far from being effective and lacks in sufficient democratic legitimacy on the European level. There is no clear vision of the further EU enlargements and how to help less developed countries on Europe's periphery and in its nearest neighborhood to close the development gap and modernize their economic and political systems. All these problems were the subject of CASE Conference "Europe after the Enlargement".
CASE's experience as the international think tank dealing with the problems of European integration, global economy and post-transition development agenda, as well as our network connections has allowed CASE to invite the best speakers and commentators not only from Europe but from outside Europe as well: Iryna Akimova, Anders Åslund, Leszek Balcerowicz, Arup Banerji, Erik Berglof, Tito Boeri, Harry G. Broadman, Fabrizio Coricelli, Declan Costello, Mikhail Dmitriev, Refik Erzan, Daniel Gros, José A. Herce, Fabienne Ilzkovitz, Andrey Ivanov, Eugen Jurzyca, Micheline Lambrecht, Patrick Lenain, Johannes Linn, Vladimir Mau, Kalman Mizsei, Georges de Menil, Roman Mogilevsky, Jørgen Mortensen, Judit Nemenyi, Jean Pisani-Ferry, Ondrej Schneider, Tony Shorrocks, Ben Slay, Krassen Stanchev, Viktor Steiner, Vito Tanzi, Jean-ClaudeTrichet, Oleg Ustenko, Andrew Warner, Wing Thye Woo, Charles Wyplosz, Ruslan Yemtsov, Josef Zieleniec.
The conference gathered 230 participants from 30 countries and several international organizations from 3 continents. Researchers, policy experts and analysts, mostly from academia, economic policy research institutes, international organizations and financial institutions from the entire Europe and CIS (including the non-EU countries) as well as media and representatives of business circles have participated in the conference. Using this unique occasion the conference debates were concentrated on pan-European and global problems and long-term challenges rather than on individual country agendas. The conference programme focused on topics such as: constitutional future of the EU, economic governance in the enlarged EU and EMU, perspectives of the Lisbon strategy, social and economic consequences of population aging, perspectives of next EU enlargements and development challenges in countries neighbouring the EU.
