Wednesday
6th Dec 2023
When decisive, coordinated action from EU institutions and member states was most needed to respond to the first coronavirus outbreaks, the bloc struggled to find a common and timely response. What lessons have been learned?
Our special anniversary magazine gives an overview of the major events of these past 20 years - and, for every event, we talked to one of the key players. It makes this magazine a document of recent EU history.
Together with the Schengen agreement of 1995 which abolished most border controls, the euro is the most important symbol of European unification.
In 2016, Britain became the first member state to leave the EU. The referendum sent shockwaves through Europe and changed UK politics. As the first casualties, EU and British citizens have been caught in limbo.
Over one million people seeking refuge arrived in the European Union in 2015 - among them a Malian political activist and poet, who has since been granted asylum in Italy.
The contentious negotiations on the EU's data protection rules (GDPR), very much influenced by intense lobbying from the US, radically changed after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that US intelligence services were collecting worldwide user-data.
All EU action on the climate stands at the crossroads between domestic ambition and international cooperation - especially with the G20 countries, which are responsible for about 80 percent of all global emissions.
The far-right rose in power over the span of 2017 and 2018. But for former EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, they never posed a real threat. "They are not right because their basic societal analysis is wrong," he said.
Trump picked fights with everybody - except Russia and North Korea - in the past four years. But he lost, including his fight with reality, US journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said.
In 2012, the Norwegian Nobel Committee unanimously decided that developments in Europe after World War II represented the "fraternity between nations" and "peace congresses" cited by Alfred Nobel as criteria for the peace prize in his 1895 will.
"I was a very regular girl, working in sales and marketing. No one in my family was politically active. There was no justice anywhere, but we all kept silent. For some reason, I started to feel angry about it."
EU diplomacy has changed from a man with a phone to "a very large ship", but growth in bulk came with loss of agility, French former diplomat, Pierre Vimont, said.
The financial crisis eventually went to the core of the institutional infrastructure of the euro - whose reform is still ongoing a decade later.
Jose Manuel Barroso was European Commission president before and after the Lisbon Treaty entered into force in December 2009. He discusses how it impacted his work and the broader implications for an expanding European Union.
It might have made sense economically, but the infamous Bolkestein Directive directly foreshadowed later tensions over migrant workers and highlighted social anxieties that became more dominant after the 2009 economic crisis.
"Both referenda weren't about the constitution," Guy Verhofstadt says. "In France, it became a referendum on Jacques Chirac. In the Netherlands, it was about whether they paid too much - something some Dutch politicians have been repeating for 10 years."
As enthusiasm for further enlargement withers, Donald Tusk said it's in the EU's interests not to let China or Turkey replace Europe as the "attractive role model" for millions whose dreams of freedom are similar to his from decades ago.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 split Western allies, cost millions of lives, destabilised and radicalised the Middle East - but there is still "no sense of failure" in America.
Sherin Khankan is a female Imam who runs the Mariam Mosque in Copenhagen. The idea for the mosque came a month before two planes slammed into the World Trade Center skyscrapers in New York on 11 September, 2001.
