The next video  Brussels Briefing will be given by Peter Ludlow on Thursday 28 October at 11.00 CET.  If you would like to attend please register at celudlow@gmail.com so that we can send you an invitation to Google Meets.

The Brussels Briefings will start again once all lockdown restrictions are lifted. In the meanwhile Peter Ludlow has started writing a quick evaluation of each meeting of the European Council which is published by LUP within 7 days of each meeting. Subscribers to European Council Studies should have received a copy of Post-Summit Briefing 2020.

The scope and character of the Forum

The European Strategy Forum has established itself as a preferred meeting place of top policymakers close to members of the European Council, the permanent representatives of the EU member states, senior officials in the EU institutions, ambassadors and other representatives of the EU’s more important global partners and leading figures in the business world, academia and the media.

Chaired until recently by Antonio Vitorino, Vladimir Drobnjak and Peter Ludlow, the ESF meets three or four times a year. Antonio Vitorino’s appointment as Director General of the IOM means that he can no longer act as chairman, but we are delighted to say that Frans Van Daele has agreed to take his place from January 2020 onwards.

One of several explanations of the Forum’s ‘uniqueness’- our members’ word not ours- is its composition and its size. Approximately two thirds of the 30/35 participants at every meeting are either current or recent insiders, who know how the EU system works and what it can and cannot deliver. We are always open to bold ideas in other words, but they are subject to a rigorous reality check.

Attendance at the ESF is by invitation only. However if you think that your company would both benefit from and be able to contribute to these confidential, high level discussions please contact us to discuss the possibilities.

Historians and other academics interested in the evolution of the European Union over time or at one particular period may like to buy some of the commentaries written since 2000. Peter Ludlow intends to edit and republish the whole series going back to 2000. However, if scholars have an urgent need for a particular paper or year of papers please send your request to celudlow@gmail.com.

EuroComment is a small publishing house not a library or university. Individual papers cost between €5 – €15 depending how many European Council meetings are covered in each paper. A full year of archive papers costs €100.

See the complete list of EuroComment papers updated to December 2019.

The last publication by EuroComment on the December European Council, ECBN 2019/8 was published in mid February. The first publication by Leuven University Press, Pre-summit Briefing 2020/1 was published on February 19, 2020. If you subscribed to EuroComment in 2019 and your subscription does not expire until later in 2020 you should have received this first LUP publication. Please make sure that you have sent LUP your email address.

In order to comply with GDPR (the EU privacy regulation) EuroComment is not allowed to send clients’ email addresses to LUP. It is therefore imperative that clients whose subscriptions run into 2020 and are affected by the change of regime fill in the subscription form already sent to them (and available on LUP’s website) and attach their own and relevant colleagues email addresses. In this way they will continue to receive the publications for which they have paid.

Not yet a subscriber? Prices and subscriptions on LUP’s website.

New publications (and occasional comments) will be tweeted at:
Peter Ludlow
@PWLEurocomment

EuroComment’s stock in trade is, and will remain, independent, well-informed analysis of EU politics at the highest level. Against the background of the euro crisis we launched a highly successful dialogue programme involving both public and private actors.

The centrepiece of this programme is a series of four or five dialogue meetings a year. Each meeting involves a working session of approximately 3 hours plus a working dinner of 2-3 hours. The number of participants will never exceed 25, of whom up to 12 will come from banks, pension funds, mutual funds and other investment groups, and 5-8 from the EU institutions and member state governments. There will also be up to 7 independent experts, including the chairman, Peter Ludlow.