ESI conference in Amsterdam - Communicating Europe

Pieter De Gooijer

• Conference program
• ESI manual: The Dutch EU enlargement debate. Information and contacts (March 2009)
• ESI report: Beyond enlargement fatigue? The Dutch debate on Turkish accession (2006)

The latest phase of ESI's Communicating Europe project ended with a one day meeting in Amsterdam on 23 November 2009 of senior West Balkans officials working on European integration issues. They were there to discuss Dutch perspectives on EU enlargement and the lessons from the visa liberalisation process, and to meet Dutch policy-makers, TV and newspaper editors.

The workshop explored consensus building in the Netherlands and looked at how the Dutch political class and interest groups define fundamental foreign policy positions. It also discussed the lessons from 2009 for the future of the enlargement process, with a new European Parliament in place, with a new European Commission, and the Lisbon Treaty reforms, coming into effect, and with a successful visa liberalisation process. This was the eighth workshop in the Communicating Europe series of informal events.

The speakers from Amsterdam included Pieter De Gooijer, Director-General for Political Affairs, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dion van den Berg, Senior Policy Adviser, IKV Pax Christi, Ben Crum, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Free University of Amsterdam, and Marc Kranenburg, Diplomatic Editor, NRC Handelsblad. The workshop engaged 18 senior figures from seven West Balkan states – from Government, TV and NGOs.

The event was hosted by the Felix Meritis Centre in Amsterdam. It was funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office under the Strategic Programme Fund and supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the European Fund for the Balkans.

Srdjan Majstorovic and Boris Vujcic

Chris Langdon, Gerald Knaus, and Alexandra Stiglmayer (ESI)