“Europe will be forged in crisis, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. Jean Monnet wrote these words decades before the EU existed in its current form. Their weight became even more tangible for me during three weeks spent in Berlin, Brussels and Bucharest ‒ three weeks in which every conversation seemed to confirm that Europe is, once again, being forged. The 7th Executive Seminar on EU Rapprochement and Integration, organised by the German Federal Foreign Office, turned out to be an encounter with Europe at a moment of radical self-reassessment.

This zeitgeist followed us across three countries and dozens of rooms. In Berlin, Brussels and Bucharest alike, something had shifted in the way officials spoke about the EU project ‒ less ceremonial, more searching. Beneath the formal agendas ran a quieter, more urgent current: what kind of European Union does this moment demand?

One of the main answers that emerged was that enlargement is no longer perceived only as a bureaucratic process to be managed ‒ it has become a strategic imperative to be embraced. When the Copenhagen criteria were formulated in 1993, democracy, the rule of law and a market economy were seen as sufficient foundations for membership. That world no longer exists. Security has become a value in itself ‒ one that must be created, protected and sustained. You might even speak of an unwritten addition to the Copenhagen criteria: the capacity to protect the European way of life. Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine has made it painfully clear that grey zones in Europe are not instruments of geopolitical balance, they are invitations for aggression. The cost of non-enlargement has proved higher than the cost of enlargement. And it is precisely this understanding ‒ hard-earned, not theoretical ‒ that candidate countries bring to the table.

The three weeks traced this debate across three cities. Berlin gave direct access to officials from the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Chancellery, and the Bundestag ‒ those who shape Germany's positions on Europe ‒ alongside journalists and think tank analysts. What emerged was not a single narrative but a layered one: arguments and reservations, political calculations and institutional constraints, spoken with a frankness that diplomatic language rarely permits. Enlargement, seen from Berlin, is not only a matter of criteria met or chapters closed, but also a political conversation, ongoing and unfinished, shaped as much by domestic considerations as by events on the ground.

Brussels shifted the scale of the conversation. Where Berlin showed what debates unfold inside one consequential member state, Brussels showed us where those perspectives enter a larger arena ‒ at the EEAS and the European Commission, but also in conversations with German political foundations and think tanks that provide input for the institutions' policy debates from the outside. Together they revealed something about how European consensus is actually built: slowly, in response to conflicting arguments, and across many tables. A visit to NATO Headquarters reminded us that the conversation about Europe's future is not confined to EU institutions alone. The debate is being held in many rooms simultaneously.

Bucharest offered a different kind of perspective ‒ not institutional, but experiential. Romania has made the journey that candidate countries are now navigating, and it continues to operate in an environment shaped by geographic proximity to conflict and sustained exposure to hybrid warfare. Our conversations there offered a longer view: how EU membership has reshaped a state, an economy and a society over two decades, what that transformation actually cost, and what challenges it did not resolve.

Yet some of the most important exchanges happened beyond the official agenda, in the informal spaces the programme created ‒ among participants who brought to the table not only their institutional roles, but the lived experience of countries for whom these questions are anything but theoretical. Diplomats and officials representing countries across the Western Balkans and Eastern Europe ‒ with different histories, different speeds of integration and different immediate realities ‒ found, repeatedly, that we share more than we had assumed. Not only common aspirations, but common analyses, common challenges and a common conviction that our futures are bound up with Europe's future.

The Diplomacy by Networking team built a programme that made this kind of openness possible. I am deeply grateful to Ambassador Christine Althauser, Michael Schultheiß, Lauritz Dauer, and Christian Szednicsek for the care they brought to every detail and for the atmosphere that made it work.

The seminar did not offer easy answers. But it offered something more valuable: a shared language for asking the right questions, and a network of people committed to finding the answers together.

Monnet was right. However, it is not the crises themselves that forge Europe ‒ it is the answers they demand. Countries that have chosen Europe are part of what makes it stronger.

Mykhailo Livariuk