When he proposed the creation of a European Political Community (EPC) in May 2022, French President Macron compared it to the G7 and its focus on peer-to-peer meetings among leaders under a rotating presidency. The EPC was supposed to provide a new platform to discuss strategic issues on the continent, filling the gap for a political dialogue among EU, candidate and non-EU countries after Russia blew up the European security order with its full-scale war against Ukraine. Created in a haphazard manner to respond to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this new platform for unscripted strategic discussions between heads of state or government of more than 40 European countries has been left without a permanent secretariat. Summit preparations and follow-up are essentially left to the rotating presidencies.
The legitimacy of the EPC will depend on its ability to demonstrate its value added by delivering on commitments made at the summit level. Public scrutiny and political accountability are especially important in the absence of public documents that state the EPC’s intent, lay out the values and principles of its work, and concretely identify its working methods.
To those ends, this project will create a sustainable, civil society-owned instrument that supports the current and upcoming presidencies and members of the EPC as well as the general public in monitoring and assessing the implementation of the initiatives agreed at the European leaders’ summit level.
The online EPC Observatory will be co-managed by CEPS and CSOs in the countries hosting upcoming EPC Summits. Basing itself on extensive and ongoing desk research, the Observatory allows the policymaker and citizen alike to understand the purpose of the EPC and unpack initiatives taken in the context of the EPC. These can be filtered by Summit, policy domain, and country.
The EPC observatory is developed by CEPS and funded by Open Society Foundations.
