Summer School 2023 <Contemporary Europe> Session 13 > Summer School at KU

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The second session of Dr. Heungchong Kim was about the EU membership, pandemic and the war. Geopolitically, Europe is now in a critical place. The European Union had been expanding since its first establishment, and a lot of Eastern European nations had applied for the membership. There are certain criteria to be met to be a member, where the nations have to calculate the costs and benefits of the membership. Turkey and Ukraine are well-known applicants waiting for the EU to sign up for their accession. But acquiring membership is not an easy procedure as they have to meet all the criteria, such as quantifiable capacity of the nations and to the identity as ‘Europe’ and rule of law. On the other hand, UK had withdrawn from the EU due to various political and economic reasons, which turned out to have negative effect on UK’s economy and politics alike in retrospect. The specific procedures and negotiations made between 2016 and 2021 were explained in detail, including EU-UK TCA. Post-Brexit left many challenges for the UK, including the movement of independence from Northern Ireland and Scotland.

COVID was another major issue for EU’s economy, where its short-term effect had mostly recovered. But long-term considerations were left, as the Europe started to accelerate its green transformation, rethought about the dependency on China arguing about economic security and strategic autonomy. The war in Ukraine had come as another challenge for the European Union. Supply chain is in a bottleneck situation and the war kept price indices higher for the EU citizens and industries. The economic outlook for Europe is not optimistic, UK suffering worse than its neighbors across the sea.