Introducing The EU-VALUES Network
In the face of today's global challenges, the European Union (EU) and its member states are reassessing their strategies to uphold and promote their core values. The Union’s commitment to democracy, equality, the rule of law, human rights, freedom, and respect for human dignity is not just rhetorical. These principles, enshrined in Articles 2 and 21 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), are crucial within the EU and should form the bedrock of its foreign policy.
With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gained legal force as primary EU law. Since then, all EU legislative proposals and legal acts are systematically checked for their economic, social, and environmental effects and undergo a detailed assessment of their possible impact on fundamental rights. In the last decade, the EU has published several strategies for engaging in world affairs. These documents include overall strategies such as Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe (2016) and A Strategic Compass for the EU (2021), policy-specific strategies such as the CyberSecurity Strategy for the Digital Decade (2020), Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change (2021), An Open, Sustainable and Assertive Trade Policy (2021), and strategies for interaction with other ‘world regions’ and its neighbours.
Some of these initiatives were introduced, when the world started changing dramatically. In 2020, a global pandemic confronted humanity with unpreceded public health and economic challenges, causing severe disruptions to societies all over the globe, to the functioning of supply chains, and people’s movements. In addition, in 2022, the spectre of war re-emerged on the European continent with Russia’s unwarranted full-scale assault on Ukraine, which has acted as a strategic reset for Europe.
Suddenly, the geopolitical dimension came back with force, and the EU’s Conference on the Future of Europe of May 2022 proposed that the EU improves “its capacity to take speedy and effective decisions, notably in CFSP, speaking with one voice and acting as a truly global player, projecting a positive role in the world and making a difference in response to any crisis”. More recently, however, the war in Gaza following the terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023, has raised multiple tensions to define a unified position across the Union and its member states in respect to the retaliation policy implemented Israel.
An integrated and powerful EU foreign policy is still under development, with many areas currently dominated by conflicting interests among European countries. In this rapidly evolving global environment, the Union and its member states should aim to rethink older approaches to foreign policy and norms promotion.
The EU-VALUES Network aims to contribute significantly to this effort. We seek to foster a broader debate on the crucial role of democratic values in the EU’s foreign policy, as well as in the foreign policies of all nations committed to defending democracy. Our strategy will involve open discussions on promoting Article 2 and Article 21 TEU values through foreign policy, engaging international organizations and subnational governments. We will evaluate the most effective tools and approaches, aiming to enhance EU perspectives and cross-fertilize them with diverse experiences and initiatives.
Beyond more general discussions, our consortium aims to increase the debate about the overall efficacy of the EU’s foreign policy and how its foreign policy is received by countries around the world. We are aware that this approach could be considered complicated, as it struggles with many contradictions between internal and external policies on democracy and value promotion. These contradictions are present internally in the EU, where backsliding member states such as Hungary (and formerly Poland) openly attack Article 2 values. There are also expanding external problems with policy coherence in other fields such as migration. As indicated before, due to its limited powers in external policy, the EU is barely speaking with “one voice” and is caught in contradictions due to different positions and actions of its member states. Some EU member states also have a complicated colonial past, which still casts shadows over their foreign policies.
Against this background, EU-VALUES will analyse and debate on how EU foreign policy can promote and disseminate EU’s core values in four workpackages: Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law (WP2), Protecting Human Rights (WP3), Preserving Peace, Freedom, and Multilateralism (WP4), and Achieving Sustainable Development Goals (WP5).
We will disseminate our work, anchored on these four work packages, through our website eu-values.eu, which will also offer a regularly updated blog, an electronic newsletter featuring cutting-edge research and didactic material, databases, interactive tools, webinars, and video series.
Stay tuned and join our newsletter here: