All the states of geographical Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals and from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and the Caucasus, met in Prague for the first European Political Community (EPC) Summit. These are 43 heads of state and government, to which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be added via video conference.

Only Russia, a pariah state since invading Ukraine on February 24, and Belarus, its ally, are absent.

Only the Ukraine conflict, the first war of aggression between two sovereign states on the Old Continent since the Second World War, has led to so many European countries sitting around one table.

It was the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, who first mentioned this project on May 9th in Strasbourg, before officially presenting it to the European Council on June 23rd. His idea: to offer the European authorities a kind of “anteroom”, a more flexible political structure which, without replacing possible future accession, could be offered to the peripheral states of the continent and the EU, some of which feel threatened by Russian expansionism fully integrated into the European family in the field of economic cooperation in order to prepare them for their full integration into the Union.

So if this meeting can provide a glimpse into the future architecture of a great European Union that would finally unify the continent’s geographic borders, the exercise is diplomatically risky, as this expanded group brings together states with sometimes very conflicting geopolitical relationships.

This applies, for example, to Greece and Cyprus on the one hand, which are opposed to Turkey in the border dispute in the eastern Mediterranean, and on the other hand to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is only recognized by Istanbul. Or Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries that have accused each other of territorial encroachments after clashing in 2022 over the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Another geopolitically sensitive issue that Serbia opposes to several Balkan countries: on the one hand, after the 1998 war, Belgrade still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence; On the other hand, he tacitly supports the separatist forces of the Serb Republic of Bosnia, a federal entity governed by Sarajevo.

The presence of the United Kingdom in the CPE, the first state to voluntarily leave the Union in 2020, is also under scrutiny: some observers hope that London will reintegrate into the European community while negotiations with Brussels on the consequences of Brexit are ongoing very contradictory.