This is a common space.

EU podcast.

From the city of the Hague, welcome to Global Europe Unpact, a podcast about Europe's engagement

with its neighborhood and wider world.

Governments have to take into account that they have to talk to the public.

They have to keep the people involved in this process.

Hello and welcome to Global Europe Unpacked, a series by commonspace.EU in collaboration with the city of the Hague,

in which we host conversations on the future of Europe in the world.

I am your host, Will Murray, and today we are going to be talking about the important and challenging topic of EU expansion.

The topic of European Union enlargement encapsulates more than any other topic the interaction

between the processes going on inside the EU with those outside of it.

It is discussed often in response to questions that go to the heart of the European project.

Should the EU be considering new members or should it consolidate

first? What makes a country European? The question where this Europe end has been asked

repeatedly over the last three decades but never properly answered. For a long time,

expansion was a central foreign policy tool for the EU, but now some in the bloc are very much

against it. In this episode, we shall start with the conversation I conducted with the Ambassador of Georgia

to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, His Excellency David Solomonia, about why his country is set

on joining the European Union, why it should be allowed to, and why Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova,

or the Associated Trio, signed an agreement with each other last year to cooperate on EU membership.

We shall then hear an academic perspective on the different considerations associated with EU enlargement from Professor Antoinetta Dmitrova,

Professor of Comparative Governance at Leiden University. It should be noted that these conversations were recorded before Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24th of February.

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