Expert Workshop: The Future of EU’s Eastern Policy Scenarios for the future of relations between the EU, the Russian Federation and the Eastern Partnership countries

The deep crisis in relations between the European Union and the Russian Federation has raised fundamental questions about the EU’s policy towards its eastern neighbours. 2014/15 is likely to come to be seen as a critical juncture in the relations between the EU, the Russian Federation and the countries of the Eastern Partnership.

The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the Study Committee on French-German Relations (Cerfa) of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri) are hosting an expert workshop that aims to discuss what policy options France, Germany and their European partners should consider to define their common interests and shape the EU's future policy.

The discussion will be based on a new report published by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung on “Europe and the East in 2030”. The report was based on three workshops in which a group of experts identified the driving forces that shape the relationship and discussed four possible future trajectories for the EU's relationship with its eastern neighbors. We will present the four scenarios and discuss how the EU can make the more positive scenarios more likely and prevent the more negative scenarios from becoming reality.