{"id":28781,"date":"2016-07-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-18T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aspeninstitutece.softmedia.cz\/news-article\/aspen-review-cafe-we-dont-want-to-tear-down-europe\/"},"modified":"2016-07-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-07-18T22:00:00","slug":"aspen-review-cafe-we-dont-want-to-tear-down-europe","status":"publish","type":"news-article","link":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/news-article\/aspen-review-cafe-we-dont-want-to-tear-down-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen Review Caf\u00e9: „We don’t want to tear down Europe“"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 13, Caf\u00e9 Jedna, Prague<\/p>\n

Are Central European states perceived as troublemakers in the European Union? Can we speak of the re-emergence of an East-West divide? And what is the future of European integration? These and many other questions were discussed at the debate dedicated to the latest issue of the Aspen Review Central Europe quarterly<\/a>, with an eponymous title Barbarians of Central Europe?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Four distinguished guests, each from one of the V4 countries, accepted our invitation to take part in the discussion: Gy\u00f6rgy Sch\u00f6pflin<\/strong> (Member of the European Parliament), Milan Je\u017eovica<\/strong> (Senior Fellow, MESA10), Aleksander Kaczorowski<\/strong> (Editor in Chief, Aspen Review CEE), and Martina Ma\u0161kov\u00e1<\/strong> (presenter and host).<\/p>\n

The speakers agreed that while there are clearly differences between the EU member states, they should be perceived as natural, rather than problematic. As Aleksander Kaczorowski noted: „The European Union is a permanent process of negotiation.“<\/p>\n

Gy\u00f6rgy Sch\u00f6pflin, however, pointed out to a certain double standard in the treatment of old and new member states within the EU’s institutions – the fact that the term „new member states“ is still being used a decade after the enlargement is, according to him, in fact a symptom of such inequality.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Milan Je\u017eovica emphasized that the V4 countries are important contributors to integrated Europe because of the experience they have come through in recent history. He warns against excluding ourselves from the European project and accepting the label of troublemakers.<\/p>\n

The debate concluded with a statement by Gy\u00f6rgy Sch\u00f6pflin\u00a0about the current rise of xenophobia and populism in (not only) the Central European region. He doesn’t see these trends as substantial threats for the future of Europe. Rather, we should focus on other current issues, such as digitalization or economic challenges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Should the V4 countries be perceived as „Barbarians of Central Europe“?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14906,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-tag":[580],"class_list":["post-28781","news-article","type-news-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-tag-aspen-review-cafe-cz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article\/28781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news-article"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-tag?post=28781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}