The European family gathers in Hungary: the fifth EPC summit

On Thursday 7 November, the leaders of forty-plus states from across Europe will meet in Budapest to discuss the continent’s security challenges. It is the fifth time the fledgling European Political Community (EPC) will have met, and it offers the perfect opportunity for a collective stock-take of the US election result. But there will be much more to consider at this strategic forum.

It may well be that the new US president has yet to be declared by the time Europe’s leaders face the press in Budapest. If Trump is victorious, summit host Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary and the American’s closest ally in Europe, will have a field day. (He may even have proposed the event date for this reason.) If it is Harris, most attendees will breathe a sigh of relief. Whatever the scenario, all will need to digest what the president elect means for their own country and for the continent’s security.

What is the EPC?

Although some dismissed it as a mere talking shop when it was initially proposed by French president Macron in spring 2022, the European Political Community is becoming a six-monthly fixture on the diplomatic calendar for a good reason. There is no other place where leaders from across Europe can speak as sovereign equals about their shared interests.

As BIG has argued before, the forum is a fitting and timely response to the demise of Europe’s post-Cold War order.¹ We believe it enables its members to meet and strategize in ways not dissimilar to how they acted in 1945 or 1989, or even earlier, in 1648 and 1815, when hard questions about war, peace and order demanded novel answers.

In today’s strategic context, the EPC’s main purpose is to foster a sense of trust and of belonging to ‘Europe’, which in principle includes all states on the continent albeit excluding Russia and Belarus for now. This explains three essential features of the EPC: its attractiveness as a meeting place for presidents and prime ministers, its apparent disregard for concrete ‘deliverables’ or official communiqués, and its unrepentant focus on shared interests rather than values. These characteristics, which might all too easily be considered shortcomings, are the community’s main strengths. 

What to watch for in Budapest

Invitation only

The guest list is one way to judge the importance of an informal gathering of this kind. At its inaugural meeting in Prague, the ritual family photo of 44 European leaders – the presidents of Russia and of Belarus notably absent – was the most important visual communication from the EPC. It conveyed the message that Europe was united and acknowledged the violent new geostrategic schism that had opened across the continent.

One guest to watch in Budapest will be Turkey’s President Erdoğan. He attended the 2022 Prague summit but found various reasons to absent himself from the three subsequent EPC gatherings in Chişinău (Moldova), Granada (Spain) and Blenheim (UK).² As a Black Sea neighbour to Ukraine and Russia, Turkey is the one regional power able and willing to keep lines open to both. With Putin-friendly Orbán as host, Erdoğan may find the environs more conducive and show up this time. His presence in Budapest would signal his country’s renewed interest in the forum, whereas yet another absence would inevitably weaken the EPC’s geostrategic clout. 

Another important guest is Ukrainian president Zelensky. Once his initial suspicion that the EPC was designed as a waiting room for EU accession had been laid to rest in the summer of 2022, he became a regular attendee, joining the Prague summit virtually and the later gatherings in person. Zelensky’s decision to participate will be significant given Hungary’s often ambivalent stance towards Ukraine amidst the ongoing war with Russia.

Time for interpersonal diplomacy

Without formal communiqués, the key ‘deliverables’ of the EPC summits are informal get-togethers at the margins of the scheduled programme. Some side-meetings are about concrete deals among a limited number of participants (such as on energy cooperation). Others have been focused on patching up political rows (such as between Paris and London at the time of the Liz Truss government) or mediation in more serious conflicts (such as between Serbia and Kosovo). In Blenheim, a newly elected Keir Starmer used the opportunity to assert himself as the face of Britain in one-to-one conversations with his counterparts.

Initially it was also hoped the forum could contribute to conflict resolution between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Two years ago in Prague, President Macron and European Council president Michel took aside the warring leaders of both states. But the diplomatic process initiated, which also involved German chancellor Scholz, failed to yield results. After his Nagorno-Karabakh offensive of summer 2023, Azeri president Aliyev stayed away from the October 2023 Granada meeting, no doubt to avoid a frosty reception.

A responsive agenda

After four summits, an order of play has emerged (as outlined in the official letter of invitation³): a plenary opening session (this time on security challenges), four parallel breakout sessions on two themes (economic security and migration) and a plenary closing session, with ‘ample opportunities’ for side-events during the day. Topics will have been prepared by the respective governments’ high-level diplomatic advisors or ‘sherpas’. 

Although energy security dominated early summit conversations – in the context of energy decoupling from Russia – recent political attention has been shifting towards concerns over migration. A year ago, then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak tried in vain to force the topic onto the agenda in Granada. Today, numerous leaders have pressed for its inclusion (in addition to the host Orbán, a notorious migration hardliner). In Budapest, leaders are expected to discuss the fight against human trafficking, return hubs and the option of asylum procedures in safe third countries in a plenary session.

Prospects for future meetings

It is still too early to tell whether the European Political Community will become an historical footnote, a short-lived continental response to the Ukraine invasion, or whether it will take as an institution and flourish as a Europe-wide strategic forum. For now, it seems that for national leaders it serves a purpose. They have already decided to reconvene in 2025 in Albania and Denmark, confirming the six-monthly rhythm and the practice of alternating between non-EU and EU hosts.

Although the press seemed to lose interest after Granada (and especially when the July 2024 Blenheim Palace EPC was squeezed in between the Washington NATO summit and the Paris Olympics), the upcoming Budapest gathering will serve as a focal point for European media attention, if only because of its timing. Indeed, the outcome of this week’s US election may well bring a new urgency to and an upsurge in continental solidarity that the forum rightly seeks to channel and express. In BIG’s view, Europeans should lose no time in preparing for the new administration entering the White House in January.