European Union

The Council has approved the resolution on the second cycle of the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training towards the European Education Area (2026-2030), which sets out the work programme for cooperation at EU level in the areas of education and training over the next five years.

Statement by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the alignment of certain third countries with Council Decision (CFSP) 2026/1363 of 15 June 2026 amending Decision (CFSP) 2024/1484 concerning restrictive measures in view of the situation in Russia.

Statement by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the alignment of certain third countries with Council Decision (CFSP) 2026/1351 of 15 June 2026 amending Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643 concerning restrictive measures in view of Russia’s destabilising activities.

The Council has approved conclusions calling on member states to take into account the interplay between housing needs and demographic trends when developing housing policies.

President of the European Council, António Costa, will travel to Dublin (1 July) for the opening ceremony of the Irish presidency of the Council of the EU, and to Aix-en-Provence (2-3 July) to participate in the “Rencontres Économiques”. On 4 July, President Costa will visit Marseille, Avignon and the ITER Headquarters in Saint Paul-lez-Durance.

Council gives its final approval to the package to reform the research fund for coal and steel

The Council today appointed two new prosecutors to the European Public Prosecutor's Office. European prosecutors supervise investigations and prosecutions and, together with the European Chief Prosecutor, form the EPPO College.

The Council today reached positions on the cohesion-related parts of the next long-term EU budget (MFF): the regulations on the European Regional Development Fund and the European Social Fund. 

The Council gave its final green light on a new regulation aiming to streamline and simplify certain rules regarding artificial intelligence (AI). 

The Council adopted recommendations on integrated wildfire risk management to help member states better prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from wildfires.

The Council formally adopted the regulation concerning circularity requirements for vehicle design and the management of end-of-life vehicles.

Council adopts new rules to improve farmers’ position in the EU food supply chain, ensuring they receive a fairer share of value by strengthening their negotiating power.

The Council has approved conclusions calling on EU countries and the Commission to improve protection for girls and young women in the digital sphere. 

Weekly schedule of President António Costa, 29 June - 5 July 2026.

Introduction

“One can say without exaggeration that Europe invented a ‘convergence machine’, taking in poor countries and helping them become high-income economies.” This was the famous assessment of Indermit Gill, Chief Economist for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank, in 2012. Now, more than a decade later, this ‘convergence machine’ has delivered meaningful economic catch-up (Bulgaria’s GDP per capita has risen from approximately 35% to 65% of the European Union (EU) average since the 2007 accession). Yet, the country’s performance looks more uneven when assessed through the lens of innovation capacity.

Nearly two decades after EU accession, the Eastern European state remains classified as an “Emerging Innovator” on the European Innovation Scoreboard. Business Research & Development (R&D) expenditure remains low, university-industry collaboration remains limited, and overall innovation outputs continue to lag behind EU averages. However, Bulgaria is neither institutionally isolated nor insufficiently integrated into European innovation governance. On the contrary, it has formally adopted key EU innovation frameworks, such as a smart specialisation strategy, and has embedded digital transition agendas in its National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The country participates in collaborative R&D instruments such as Horizon Europe.

Bulgaria’s experience therefore presents a puzzle. Despite deep integration into European innovation governance, innovation performance remains persistently weak and uneven. This suggests that convergence cannot be understood simply as policy alignment or participation in EU frameworks. Instead, the key question becomes why deep integration has failed to generate systemic innovation upgrading and why outcomes remain conditioned by deeper structural and historical constraints.

 

The Convergence Expectation and Its Limits

EU integration has been expected to lead to institutional and economic convergence, yet European Commission reports, such as those on “Regional Trends for Growth and Convergence in the European Union” and “Missing Convergence in Innovation Capacity,” indicate that this has not happened uniformly in practice. European innovation governance seeks to strengthen innovation capacity and reduce territorial disparities, but its effects depend heavily on domestic conditions and are often strongest where pre-existing industrial capabilities, dense knowledge networks, and robust administrative capacity already exist (Rodríguez-Pose & Crescenzi, 2008).

Evidence increasingly suggests that innovation outcomes remain shaped by differences in economic structure and institutional capacity, even under common policy frameworks. EU Research & Innovation funding, for example, remains geographically concentrated across the Union. Such patterns highlight the importance of absorptive capacity, since formal policy harmonisation does not eliminate the influence of historical industrial structures, the quality of domestic demand, or the ability of local actors to translate external resources into sustained development. Where institutional and economic conditions are unevenly developed, externally supported innovation may become fragmented into short-term, project-based activity. Büttner (2019) describes this process as the ‘projectification’ of EU governance, a process that can limit systemic spillovers under conditions of weak domestic capacity. Collectively, this evidence indicates that the effects of EU integration cannot be reduced to policy alignment alone.

National Innovation Systems (NIS) theory helps explain why these constraints matter by treating innovation as an outcome of historically embedded relationships among firms, states, research institutions, and financial actors rather than policy instruments alone (Freeman, 1987). From this perspective, EU frameworks may improve formal coordination without necessarily strengthening the institutional capabilities required for innovation performance – a limitation also identified by Karo and Kattel (2015) in their analysis of Central and Eastern Europe.

 

Post-Socialist Legacy and Institutional Friction

To understand why Europe’s ‘convergence machine’ struggles to generate broad-based innovation, one must look beyond current policy frameworks to Bulgaria’s post-socialist institutional legacy. The country’s NIS remains heavily shaped by communist-era path dependencies. Bulgaria’s research landscape is marked by fragmentation, with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and regional universities operating as small, dispersed units that struggle to achieve the scale and infrastructure needed for international competitiveness, while institutional arrangements provide little support for building research-industry linkages (World Bank, 2026).

When the centrally planned economy collapsed in the 1990s, the country’s relatively advanced but highly state-dependent innovation ecosystem suffered a severe shock. State funding for R&D plummeted, leading to a “brain drain” and the physical decay of research infrastructure; indeed, R&D institutions were among the most adversely affected by the emigration of talent during the transition. According to the European Commission’s 2025 Policy Support Facility country report, these deep-rooted structural frictions persist despite EU funding and formal alignment with European standards.

In fact, the interaction between EU integration and this socialist legacy has produced complex, often unintended outcomes. EU structural and R&D funds have contributed to laboratory modernisation, yet their effects have remained uneven. As a European Joint Research Centre report (2015) observes, investment has frequently produced isolated “islands of excellence” within universities while leaving broader systemic linkages underdeveloped. Because traditions of university–industry collaboration remained weak, funding was often channelled into short-term, project-based activities rather than durable institutional partnerships. The World Bank (2026) notes that industry partnerships remain limited, applied research sporadic, and technology transfer largely dependent on temporary EU-funded initiatives. In this sense, EU resources became embedded within existing institutional arrangements, limiting their capacity to generate broader systemic change.

This structural disconnect persists because Europeanisation in Bulgaria has operated primarily through policy adoption rather than institutional transformation. Bulgaria’s strategic documents align closely with EU innovation priorities, including digital transition, competitiveness, and knowledge-based growth, as reflected in frameworks such as the EU’s New European Innovation Agenda. However, the institutional and financial capacities required to implement these ambitions remain unevenly developed. Bulgaria continues to rank among the weakest EU performers in innovation capacity, with persistent deficits in public R&D investment, firm-level innovation activity, and institutional coordination (World Bank, 2026). Consequently, alignment with European innovation governance has generated institutional compliance without systemic convergence. Policy frameworks increasingly resemble European models in form, while the underlying organisational capacities and research–industry linkages necessary to sustain broad-based innovation remain underdeveloped. Rather than overcoming inherited institutional fragmentation, European integration has frequently adapted to it, reproducing uneven innovation outcomes despite formal convergence.

 

Conclusion

The discussion supports scholarship that questions linear assumptions linking Europeanisation to developmental transformation. Bulgaria’s experience suggests that participation in common innovation frameworks does not necessarily produce convergence in innovation performance. In peripheral economies shaped by enduring institutional legacies, European integration may strengthen formal policy alignment while leaving underlying capacities for knowledge creation, diffusion, and commercialisation unevenly developed. This implies that innovation convergence should be understood as the ability of domestic systems to absorb, coordinate, and sustain innovation over time rather than through institutional resemblance alone. Reconsidering convergence in these terms may help explain why integration continues to generate differentiated outcomes across the EU.

The post Integration without Convergence? Explaining Bulgaria’s Innovation Paradox appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Az Airbus H145M és H225M helikopterei 2019-től új fejezetet nyitottak a magyar forgószárnyas katonai repülésben, azonban a mélypontról való kilábalás első lépéseit még 2016-ban sikerült megtenni. Ekkor érkezett Szolnokra az a két AS350B Ecureuil (Mókus) helikopter, amely korábban a hazai légimentést szolgálta. Az azóta eltelt évtizedről három olyan embert kérdeztem, akiket beosztásuknál és életkoruknál fogva más-más élmény és tapasztalat köt az Ecureuil helikopterekhez.  

Az AS350B helikopterek közvetlenül a rendszerváltás után, a kilencvenes évek elején jelentek meg Magyarországon. Három ilyen gép került a légimentőkhöz, akik nagyon megszerették az üzembiztos, megbízható, egyszerű típust. Amikor 2014 novemberétől egy európai uniós szabályozás megtiltotta, hogy egyhajtóműves mentőhelikopterek lakott terület felett repüljenek, a légimentők búcsút mondtak az AS350-esnek, és teljesen átálltak a 2006 óta használt EC135-ösök üzemeltetésére. Addigra a három Mókusból kettő maradt, a legfiatalabb, 1992-es gyártású gép 2009-ben Balatonfüreden felborult.

[...] Bővebben!

Next AFET committee meeting will be held on:

Tuesday 14 July 2026, room ANTALL 2Q2, Brussels

Meetings are webstreamed with the exception of agenda items held "in camera".

AFET - DROI calendar of meetings 2026
Meeting documents
Webstreaming
Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

On Thursday 2 July, the Committee on Foreign Affairs will hold a workshop on 'A new EU approach to the Sahel region'. The event aims to enrich the EP's debate and oversight of the 2025 'renewed' EU approach for the Sahel region, focusing on its central part (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger).
The workshop will provide current insights into the rapidly evolving challenges, such as security threats, political instability, and humanitarian crises, and foreign interference in a geopolitically challenging environment, following a recent wave of military coups d'état, violent jihadism and separatism.Prof. Nina Wilén will present a study on the topic, including policy options for EU cooperation with the region, in support of regional stability, peace, good governance and potentially improved relations. A debate between her and MEPs, representatives of other EU institutions, and other experts will follow suit.
Follow on-line
AFET Workshops
Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Cette note a été initialement publiée en anglais sur le site du Sejong Institute sous la forme d’un Sejong Focus le 18 juin 2026. 

Le dossier du sous-marin à propulsion nucléaire (SNA) sud-coréen n’est plus un concept abstrait ni un projet de recherche à long terme. Le 26 mai 2026, le ministère de la Défense a publié le « Plan de base pour le développement du sous-marin à propulsion nucléaire de la République de Corée », rendant public le principe selon lequel le combustible nucléaire sera constitué d’uranium faiblement enrichi (LEU) à moins de 20 %, que le développement et la construction se feront en Corée du Sud, et que les obligations de non-prolifération ainsi que les garanties de l’Agence internationale de l’énergie atomique (AIEA) seront respectées.

La Corée du Sud doit faire de l’accord sur le combustible LEU avec les États-Unis son axe fondamental, tout en institutionnalisant rapidement avec la France une coopération dans les domaines non nucléaires : intégration navale, revue de sûreté de la conception, maintenance, formation et installation d’essais à terre, ainsi que culture de sûreté nucléaire. Il ne s’agit en aucun cas d’une approche visant à contourner ou à remplacer les États-Unis. C’est une approche qui doit être comprise comme complémentaire à l’alliance, qui consiste à combiner l’expérience américaine de l’exploitation des réacteurs navals à uranium hautement enrichi (HEU) avec l’expérience française de la propulsion nucléaire navale au LEU, dans des domaines de nature différente, afin d’accroître les chances de succès et la sûreté du programme de sous-marin à propulsion nucléaire sud-coréen.

À télécharger

• Lire la note (PDF)

L’article Coopération franco-coréenne pour la construction du sous-marin à propulsion nucléaire (SNA) sud-coréen est apparu en premier sur IRIS.