EURINT 2024 | Debating Europe: new approaches, action tools and integration scenarios 24-25 May, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi The European Union has been a successful story for many decades, despite the crises it has faced over time, becoming in years a pole of attraction for other European countries. In general, crises have generated a sense of deepening integration, and the enlargements from EU6 to EU27 were seen as a natural dynamic of the "(re)integration" of the European continent, strengthening, with each stage, the EU power and relevance in the international order. The synergies between the deepening and the widening mechanisms encouraged to look for a federal future of the EU as an “ever-closer union”, a “hard core” of regional and global cooperation, and as a real economic and political power. New opportunities and challenges have emerged in 1990s, in the context of the political transformations in the Central and Eastern Europe. For the countries from this “liberated” part of Europe, the accession to the EU has been identified with their aspirations for freedom, democracy, prosperity and security, a definitive break from the hegemonic tendencies of Russia. In the same logic of European unification, the Union has enlarged from the EU15 to the EU28. The integration of diversity has been achieved based on the community method and on variable geometries, successfully applied to previous enlargements. However, an important transformation of the strategic vision of the future of the EU has occurred. Although maintaining the federalist option, with this wave of enlargement, the federalist future of EU is no longer a widely shared dream and the differentiated integration looks increasingly obvious. Lately   various crises and shocks which have hit the EU in the last two decades have shown the limits of the current system. Additional pressures are generated by the prospect of the Union enlargement to the countries of the Eastern neighborhood and the Western Balkans, which has become a priority in the foreign policy against the background of the war in Ukraine. Therefore, an even more enlarged, but also a more diverse Union is foreshadowed in a timeframe, which albeit not yet politically assumed, already requires a reconsideration of the EU's strategic agenda.