The European Union is opening its democratic resilience centre to candidate countries and potential candidates, including Moldova and Ukraine. Ministers endorsed their participation in Luxembourg on October 13. Proposed cooperation includes detecting foreign interference, crisis exercises and training, extending the centre’s work beyond EU members without changing the partners’ accession status.
The European Union is opening cooperation with the European Centre for Democratic Resilience, its platform for addressing threats to democracy, to candidate countries and potential candidates. Ministers endorsed participation on October 13 in Luxembourg. Moldova is among the partners joining the work, alongside Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine and Kosovo.[1], [2]
The European Commission lists shared methods for detecting foreign information manipulation and interference among possible activities. Cooperation could include measuring democratic resilience and tabletop crisis exercises. Training could address protection for journalists, civil society organisations, fact-checkers and politicians. EU member states can invite partners to propose projects, co-lead them or join selected activities. The Commission’s stated aim is to improve anticipation, detection and coordinated responses to threats.[1]
The centre launched on February 24. In early September it held a train-the-trainers event with the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency. A pilot stakeholder platform brings together independent media and civil society, researchers, fact-checkers and media-literacy specialists. The new participation arrangements concern this institutional cooperation; they leave the partners’ EU accession status unchanged. The Commission’s Kosovo designation preserves the stated qualification concerning positions on its status.[1]
