The Workshop: Europe in an Uncertain World: Openness, Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Small States and Middle Powers is dedicated to the multidimensional role of small states and middle powers, without excluding other states in Europe in order to achieve crisis management capacity, resilience building, prosperity and political stability.
Topics
- What specific strategies did different European small states and middle powers adopt in order to foster state capacity and resilience in the midst of today’s economic and social turmoil? Could these strategies combined create a broader policy for crisis management and resilience building, especially for small states regardless individual particularities?
- What are the main arguments over how small states (such as Iceland, Cyprus, Malta, Estonia, Ireland, and others) and emerging middle powers that belong to the Eurozone and the European Economic Area (EEA), including Turkey and Western Balkan states, dealt with the 2008-9 Eurozone crisis, and what lessons learned could formulate national economic and social policies and EU’s governance structures in the face of the current global uncertainty that stems from energy and food insecurity; global economic volatility; and the return of grand power rivalry because of the war in Ukraine?
- Are the tendencies of "slowbalization" and/or "newbalization" shaping new regional orders? How could European small states and middle powers have a meaningful role in this process that informs state capacity and institutional resilience?
- How could a policy framework on small states and middle powers be incorporated into EU’s Global Strategy and Connectivity Strategy in the digital decade in order to assist small states in the underdeveloped and developing world and expand EU’s geopolitical footprint?
- Could small states have a defining role in EU’s policies on dealing with inequalities and advancing a transformative industrial and technological revolution? How could European small states (such as Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg) play a more meaningful role in regional security, development and inter-regional cooperation? If they do, what small states’ strategic tools enhance EU’s preventative economic-diplomacy capacity?
- The global economic, social, technological and democratic revolutions are posing acute challenges for European institutional resilience. How could small states and middle powers reshape the European continent towards a highly interconnected European society of innovation? What challenges does this pose for the EU governance structures, and how could it help the EU to enhance its geopolitical role?
- What impact does the war in Ukraine have? What role for Europe’s small states and middle powers in the EU (Strategic Compass) and NATO (Strategic Concept)?
- With regard to small states’ foreign, security and defense policies, are there specificities or not? What is the specific role of alliance structures? What about the close vicinity of revisionist powers, such as Russia in relation to the Baltic States?
- What is the role of diplomacy and other foreign policy tools in small states’ and middle powers’ pursuit of national interests?
