On Wednesday, May 6, at 9 am PT, the Pacific Council is hosting a webinar featuring Charles Grant, CMG, Director of the Centre for European Reform (CER), and Dr. David M. Andrews, Faculty Emeritus at The Claremont Colleges and Senior Fellow for Europe and Russia at the Pacific Council. This conversation will focus on the central arguments of CER's 2025 Annual Report, Europe's Future: Grounds for Hope?, in which Grant identifies five interrelated challenges shaping Europe's trajectory.

Europe's troubles range from relative economic decline to growing uncertainty about the United States' long-term commitment to the continent's security. Together, those pressures represent a historic test of the European Union's cohesion and global standing. The discussion will address those concerns but also focus on Grant's conclusion that Europe nevertheless retains meaningful sources of resilience and renewal.

Why it's important:

• Over the past 25 years, Europe's global share of GDP has been steadily declining from 25% in 1990 to 14% in 2025. 
• Managing migration, a topic that became a political flashpoint for far-right parties in Europe, is again generating concerns as potential fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran might produce an outflow of Iranian citizens to the Turkish border. 
• Despite the use of reparations loans, backed by Russian Central Bank assets held in Europe, efforts to finance the Russia-Ukraine war have strained the budgets of individual EU member states. 

To register for this webinar, visit the Zoom Registration Page.

Guest Speaker

Charles Grant, CMG is the Director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, which operates in London, Brussels and Berlin. He works on, among other subjects, EU foreign and defence policy, Russia, China, the eurozone and Brexit. Previously he worked for Euromoney and The Economist, where he covered the European Community in Brussels before returning to its London office in 1993, where he soon became defence editor. He is a member of the international advisory boards of the Turkish think-tank EDAM, the French think-tank Terra Nova and the Italian think-tank Aspen Italia and has been a trustee of the Global China Academy since 2013. In 2004 he became a chevalier of France’s Ordre National du Mérite, and in 2013 a Companion of St Michael and St George (CMG) "for services to European and wider international policy-making". In 2015 he was awarded both the Bene Merito medal by the Polish government and the Star of Italy medal by the Italian government.

Presider

Dr. David M. Andrews is Faculty Emeritus at The Claremont Colleges, where he was Professor of International Relations at Scripps College, a member of the Extended Graduate Faculty of Claremont Graduate University, and founding director of the European Union Center of California. In retirement, in addition to his work with the Pacific Council, he is the founder of Advanced Problem Solving LLC (APS) and a board member of Emergency Network Los Angeles (ENLA). He also serves as a member of the Committee on Religious Affairs at the Claremont Colleges and on the Claremont Interfaith Council. 

Dr. Andrews' areas of expertise include the European Union and European integration as well as Atlantic political, security, and economic relations. His academic publications include The Atlantic Alliance Under Stress: US-European Relations After Iraq (Cambridge, 2005), International Monetary Power (Cornell, 2008), and Orderly Change: International Monetary Relations Since Bretton Woods (Cornell, 2008). He was a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Economics and held visiting appointments at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, California), the University of Southern California, and elsewhere.

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To register for this webinar, visit the Zoom Registration Page.