Europe has gone through a long series of crises from the financial and economic downturn to mass migration, terrorism to the pandemic to the outbreak of the Russo-Ukraine war and related energy crises. Furthermore, as a result of Brexit, the European integration – for the first time in its history – lost one of its strategically most important Member States, the second largest economic power in Europe. Europe is at a historical crossroad and the institutionalized European cooperation has been struggling to recognize the interests and shape the destiny of the old continent. The European Union has so far failed to give effective responses to these crises nor is it able to provide the Member States with the resilience and competitiveness necessary to cope with these novel challenges in an of age big power rivalry. The Budapest Lecture event delves into the challenges and threats Europe currently faces, exploring the common elements and intellectual roots of a European identity that that connect Europeans throughout the continent and examining basis of the European construction process and its potential way forward. These and similar issues are to be addressed by Christopher Caldwell, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute in a conversation with Lénárd Sándor, Head of the Center of International Law at the MCC. 

Christopher CLADWELL is an American writer and journalist, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books. He is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. His books include the Reflections on the Revolution In Europe, published in 2009, and The Age of Entitlement, published in 2020. 

Lénárd Sándor is the Head of Center for International Law at the MCC and of the Barna Horváth Hungary Law and Liberty Circle. He previously served as a chief counsel at the Constitutional Court of Hungary and as an advisor at the European Parliament in Brussels. 

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