The 2004 enlargement marked a watershed moment for the EU as a regional power, but also for its institutional shape. As the first bold adaptation to the post-1989 world, it brought immense change in the Central and Eastern European member states. Hungary’s trajectory, for example, illustrates the transformation: integration into European value chains, rapid economic development, and the doubling of real wages.

This “big bang” enlargement not only steadily expanded the benefits of the Single Market but also underlined the decisive tandem of widening and deepening — the EU’s need to adapt its core functioning to its expansion. Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, no comparable institutional reform has taken place, even though the EU’s functioning has been profoundly altered by subsequent crises: the financial crisis, the large influx of Syrian refugees, and the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the international environment has also changed, with direct consequences for how the Union’s institutions may need to evolve in response.

The publication of the report “Hungary 20 Years in the European Union” by the Hungarian Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation offers an opportunity to reflect on these questions. The authors’ assessment — Hungary’s balance sheet of EU membership being largely positive, while Europe’s as a whole appears more mixed — provides a starting point for a broader debate on what lessons three decades of integration, and two decades of membership, can offer for the Future of the European Union.

Please register by 10 September. This is an in-person event and will be followed by a reception.
Please register by 10 September.

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