The Europaeum is a unique multinational initiative that brings together not only some of the finest academic institutions in Europe, but some of the continent’s best and brightest young minds, connecting them across disciplines, cultures and countries.
The distinctiveness of what the Europaeum offers lies in its focus on the potential of students as individuals and the desire to help them make a difference in their future lives.
The Europaeum is committed to promoting multi-disciplinary study and learning, to addressing cross-cutting issues - past, present and future - and to working at the interface of academia and policy practice.
It seeks to overcome intellectual silos and to ‘decompartmentalise’ thinking, so that students can maximise their potential, contribution and impact, whether they pursue academic or non-academic careers in their later lives.
Concretely, the participating students receive about 80 talks, roundtables or training sessions on a wide range of policy topics and professional skills, adding up to around 300 hours of work.
Their two-year cycle ends with a special conference in Brussels, held in the autumn of every second year, at which the students share their policy projects with decision makers and opinion-formers in and around the EU institutions.
The programme also involves a personally-tailored mentoring scheme, with students matched to leaders in various policy fields for the sharing of experience and expertise.
The Europaeum seeks to give its Scholars a different, parallel, experience: they work in small teams, combine disciplines and think about future policy.
In parallel, the Europaeum’s Core Programme provides tailored opportunities for any postgraduate students from the member universities to explore issues at the intersection of scholarly and policy concerns.
These include spring, summer and winter schools, as well as an annual Brussels policy seminar each autumn designed to help them explore the EU political system in depth.
To give a flavour of the wide range of topics and issues covered by Europaeum events, the various themes of the modules in the current two-year cycle of the Scholars’ Programme include: Democracy in Europe (held in Budapest), the operation of EU institutions (Brussels), technology and policy (Barcelona), and Europe and global governance (Geneva), as well as skills training (Krakow) and policy project work (Helsinki).
The 2025 Core Programme includes events on the European Green Deal (Madrid), Europe’s uncertain world (Prague), AI and the digital revolution (Luxembourg), multipolar antiquity (Leiden), strategic autonomy (Brussels) and the ‘future of the past’ (Oxford).
They constitute the board of the Europaeum - both in its status as a charity and as a not for profit company limited by guarantee - and they usually meet two to three times a year, both in person and online.
Dr Paul Flather was appointed as Secretary General and the organisation moved from the university's offices to those of the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford.