EU lunch meeting with Mr Jim Cloos, Deputy Director-General for General and Institutional Policy at the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers.

The EU’s strategic agenda for the coming five years demonstrates its ambition to become an autonomous global player, promoting its interests and values throughout the world through its trade and foreign policy. With the return of geopolitics, the time is ripe for the EU to move beyond its historical focus on multilateral solutions, and work on stepping up its ability to defend and promote its interests through hard power. But how can it do this?

Jim Cloos will discuss some measures that the EU can take to improve its global standing, particularly focusing on the coherence and cooperation among policies (internal and external, as well as different elements of external policy) and actors (both at EU and national level). These help to answer the question of how the EU can be(come) a global player in today’s world.

(Photo credit: European Union, 1995-2019)