Global Europe Lab: First Workshop
2025-11-03
The first workshop of the Global Europe Lab was held on 3rd and 4th November 2025 at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. This project is a collaborative endeavour between the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung and the Joachim Herz Doctoral School of Law. The event brought together a group of 12 individuals, including early career researchers, journalists from ZEIT and Deutsche Welle, representatives from the Federal Foreign Office, civil society organisations, and business associations. A series of four workshops is to be held in the following months, with the objective of facilitating discussion on the future role of the European Union on the global stage. The objective of the project is to produce a policy paper.
The first meeting comprised expert presentations, a foresight workshop, and already highly profound and productive discussions. In the course of this process, preliminary concepts and principles were formulated for a forward-looking EU foreign policy that acknowledges the prevailing circumstances – encompassing the crisis of multilateralism, the resurgence of great power competition, the rule of the strongest, climate change and other profound transformations – and devises methodologies to address them. The lab is organised around three thematic priorities: (1) trade and development, (2) sustainability and climate, and (3) security, peace and the international order. Moreover, the project will also examine the dissonance between the EU's self-perception and the external perspective on the EU, the EU's search for new partners in the Global South, and its relationship with the major powers.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to our experts – Prof. Dr. Markus Kotzur(University of Hamburg), Prof. Dr. Miriam Prys-Hansen (Leuphana University Lüneburg and GIGA Hamburg), Julia Ganter (Körber Stiftung) and Johannes Kummerow (GIZ) – for their contributions, as well as to the participants for their commitment and for two extremely exciting and informative days.
