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Funda Tekin

Director of the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) in Berlin and Scientific Lead of the Horizon Europe project InvigoratEU, expert on EU enlargement and EU-Turkey relations.

Oct 9, 2026

12:09
What does Invigorate You propose here?
12:12
Actually, the aspects that you just were mentioning, the bilateral disputes between member states and candidates, or also between candidate countries and also public opinion, were among the main drivers that we analyzed for our visioning procedure with regards to the most resilient Europe.
12:31
And because we thought that this is really something that both affects the credibility of countries of the procedure and if then of course the credibility is impacted that also has a repercussion on public opinion so it's all interrelated.
12:45
The third aspect that we were also looking at was then the entire security dimension.
12:51
But starting with the bilateral disputes and I think here it's always the most prominent example is really North Macedonia to look at because North Macedonia is the only accession candidate country whose accession negotiations have officially started back in 2022, but not a single chapter has been opened so far.
13:11
So I think this is really something where bilateral disputes, in this case with Bulgaria, is actually impeding the process.
13:19
And then in the past, it was disputes with Greece with regards to the name and the flag of the country.

11 MINS LATER

24:41
Could you explain what is Invigorate EU research proposing to provide enough security to Ukraine for the country to survive in the first place to then be able to actually join the European Union?

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