Between the 20^th and 21^st of May 2022, 50 participants – including citizens, political representatives, and experts – from Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Greece met in Barcelona to discuss the internal challenges facing the European Union in a facilitated dialogue organised by the FACTS project. FACTS aims to identify the rumours, narratives and fake news about the EU that exist among mobilised and non-mobilised citizens. IAI took part in the project and helped organise the event.

In collaboration with the Embassy of Japan to Italy, the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome is organizing a one-day event comprising a morning closed door Track 1.5 Dialogue and an afternoon public workshop. This one-day even will bring together security practitioners and major experts from both Europe and Japan to analyse the implications of the War in Ukraine for further, realistic security cooperation opportunities between Japan and the European Union.

Differentiated integration and flexibility have been part of the European integration project since its early days and will remain necessity if the EU wants to overcome stalemate and improve the functioning of the European integration process. Therefore, the central question is not whether there will be a differentiated Europe, but which kind of differentiation will or rather should prevail and along which policy fields.