Dr. Pavol Demes, Senior Transatlantic Fellow, GMF US and Board Member of the European Endowment for Democracy, started out his speech by pointing out in what unusual times we are living, because not even one expert can say what will be in 5 years. In the case of Eastern Partnership it is the same, in the beginning the project seemed to be glorious, but Ukraine showed that there are even more problems than could be imagined. He talked about the experience of Slovakia in joining EU. At the beginning they thought the process was not going to take more than 2 years. But the really was that it took much longer. And after the success EU believed it would be easy to change other countries as well, though the reallity was not as expected. He said that the main difficulty for the Eastern Partnerhip is that the region it aims at is not homogeneous, unlike the case with Visegrad, Balkan and Ex-Yugoslavian countries which were pretty homogeneous. Also the politcal systems vary greatly in EP countries. He menioned that EU is open for any country, either big or small, ex-soviet or ex-yugslavian, there are only certain conditions which need to be fulfilled. In conclusion he said that there are always friends out there who are ready to help and advise and say what they did wrong and what can be changed.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 07:47:37 +0000
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