2025: A Year Of Challenges

All the commentaries published at the turn of the year had at least one thing in common: at the dawn of 2025, the European Union has rarely been faced with so many challenges, which some have not hesitated to describe as existential. Whether internal or external, political or economic, their accumulation represents an unprecedented test of the resilience of an integration model that emerged last century from a conflict that marked the end of European hegemony and ushered in a period of uncertainty, or rather a succession of certainties, about the new balance of the international system.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, the list is long indeed:  the end of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, the end of violence and the unlikely stabilization of the Middle East, the launching of a security and defence policy that has remained in limbo for too long, the management of a new transatlantic relationship, the pursuit of an enlargement with parameters that are – to say the least – nebulous, catching up with a competitiveness that is in freefall, softening the implementation of the climate and digital agendas that were the mainstays of the previous legislature, and protecting a social and democratic model that looks like a besieged fortress. There is no order of priority between these deadlines, which all appear to be equally urgent. And yet this inventory, which is certainly partial and incomplete, only includes the foreseeable: no need to recall that a pandemic confined the globe within a few months of the first Commission chaired by Mrs. von der Leyen taking office.

This brief was written on January 24, 2025. It was first published in French by the Revue du Droit de l’Union Européenne, 1-2025, Bruylant.

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