Publico | Enlargement: the European Union’s greatest “soft power” instrument is within it

The spokesman for the think tank Friends of Europe, Dharmendra Kanani, has no doubt that Charles Michel’s of Charles Michel will be dashed. ‘The big bang was in 2004 and it won’t be repeated now. Twenty years ago, the world was a different place,’ he compares, saying that European politicians ‘cannot worry or deal with this wave of enlargement based on the past. If they do they will be making a big mistake, failing to learn from past mistakes and, more importantly, failing to understand what the future holds for all of us.’