The Yerevan Spectacle: When European Diplomacy Mistakes Symbolism for Strategy A Critical Assessment of the 8th European Political Community Summit
Comunicato Precedente
Comunicato Successivo
I. Origins and Original Sin
Created in October 2022 at the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the EPC was designed to bring together more than 40 European leaders to foster “strategic intimacy” and strengthen cooperation on continental challenges, including security, stability, and prosperity.
The founding impulse was understandable: Europe faced an existential shock, and the existing institutional channels — the European Council, NATO, and the OSCE — each had its own structural limitations.
The EPC was inaugurated before it had a clear purpose, agenda, or framework.
This is not a minor design flaw.
It is the forum’s original sin, one that has compounded at each subsequent summit.
The start of the EPC is reminiscent of the Union of the Mediterranean — also born of a French initiative — which has now been dormant for several years.
The historical precedent is not encouraging.
II. Seven Summits, Zero Binding Outcomes: The Evidence
European governments owe their citizens a direct, candid answer to a straightforward question: what, specifically, has the European Political Community decided, agreed, or delivered since October 2022? Examined without diplomatic courtesy, the record is bleak.
At the inaugural Prague summit, leaders expressed unity in the face of war, affirmed support for Ukraine, and committed to “strengthening energy cooperation.” They clarified that the EPC was intended as a biannual informal platform — hence the absence of a declaration. No declaration. No commitments. No accountability mechanism.
This template has been faithfully replicated at every subsequent gathering. Summit discussions, usually organised in plenary and thematic roundtables, have failed to produce a collective dynamic that leads to larger-scale political outcomes. Over time, EPC summits have seen a decline in concrete outcomes, with the fifth summit in Budapest marking a low point, as leaders failed to produce new initiatives or agreements.
Energy security, migration, cybersecurity, support for Ukraine, and regional tensions have appeared on the agenda of virtually every summit — yet none have been resolved. The apologists for this record retreat to the claim that the EPC’s value is intangible: that “strategic intimacy,” personal relationships, and the mere fact of leaders convening in the same room produce diffuse diplomatic benefits that resist measurement.
This argument deserves the scepticism it merits.
That informality means the EPC is not equipped to deliver concrete projects.
Proponents themselves, writing in Chatham House, concede as much — while simultaneously arguing that the format has “great potential.” Potential, seven summits in, is an insufficient return on investment.
All the initiatives and projects announced during EPC summits have involved only small groups of participants — meaning that whatever bilateral or minilateral outcomes did emerge could have been, and in most cases would have been, arranged through existing channels without the logistical mobilisation of fifty governments.
A message of cooperation to tackle migration has been repeated across various summits — Granada, Blenheim, Copenhagen — yet no decisive breakthrough can be attributed solely to the EPC.
Migration remains unresolved. Energy dependence was addressed through EU legislative mechanisms, not through EPC summits. Support for Ukraine has been sustained through NATO and bilateral military packages — not through EPC communiqués.
The most frequently cited “achievement” of the EPC is the diplomatic photo taken in Prague in October 2022, in which Macron, Michel, Aliyev, and Pashinyan appeared together in the same frame. Following the Prague summit, Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to an EU peace mission and to de-escalate tensions — though analysts acknowledge this may well have happened without the EPC.
Today, as Pashinyan hosts the eighth summit in Yerevan, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process has advanced substantially — through direct bilateral diplomacy, EU mediation via the High Representative’s office, and OSCE engagement. The EPC’s marginal contribution to that outcome, if any, remains unproven. Governments are invited to dispute this assessment. They should publish, for each of the seven summits held to date, a concrete accounting: which specific decisions were made, which follow-up mechanisms were established, and which outcomes are directly attributable to the EPC rather than to parallel processes that would have proceeded regardless. Until such accountability is provided, the burden of proof rests with the institution’s defenders.
III. The Accountability Vacuum and Its Costs
The EPC’s structural architecture is not incidentally opaque — it is deliberately so. The EPC operates without a permanent secretariat, a dedicated budget, or staff, with each summit organised by the host country and supported by a limited French taskforce established in January 2023. This deliberate informality raises serious questions about transparency, accountability, and the capacity to deliver tangible results. The absence of a centralised budget does not mean the EPC is free. It means its costs are externalised — dispersed across dozens of national governments and EU institutions, rendered invisible to any aggregate public accounting, and therefore immune to democratic scrutiny. Each host nation absorbs the full burden of organising, securing, and hosting one of the world’s most logistically demanding diplomatic formats, with no standardised reporting requirement on expenditure.
The Yerevan summit illustrates this dynamic in its most extreme form. Security and traffic-control measures were announced across an unprecedented multi-day window encompassing the EPC summit, the first-ever EU-Armenia bilateral summit, a state visit by the French President, and an additional international forum — described as unprecedented since Armenia’s independence in terms of high-level attendance.
The cumulative cost of mobilising security forces, diplomatic protocols, transport logistics, and state hospitality for nearly fifty heads of government in a capital city with no prior experience of hosting events of this scale will never appear as a single, transparent public line item. It will be distributed, obscured, and forgotten — precisely as the format intends.
Every delegation travelling to Yerevan incurs costs for air transport, security details, diplomatic staffing, and accommodation. For the delegations of 47 states, the EU institutions, and invited organisations, including NATO and the Council of Europe, those costs aggregate to a figure that would, if disclosed in full, generate considerable public discomfort.
European governments invoking the principle of fiscal discipline in their domestic budgets owe their taxpayers, at a minimum, a transparent accounting of the cost of this form of diplomatic tourism.
IV. The Symbolic Inflation Problem
The 8th EPC summit is described as the largest international political event Armenia has hosted since independence, with 48 heads of state and government expected to attend. However, scale is not strategy. The more leaders attend, the more diffuse the agenda becomes, and the less any single participant can be held accountable for outcomes.
The Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, will attend as a guest — the first time a non-European country has been invited to the EPC meeting.
This expansion of the forum’s perimeter, rather than demonstrating institutional vitality, risks accelerating the erosion of whatever coherence the EPC still possesses. A European Political Community that formally incorporates Canada raises reasonable questions about what “European” means and whether the forum’s gradual enlargement reflects strategic vision or the institutional equivalent of follower acquisition.
V. What Should Be Done Instead
The critique of the Yerevan summit is not an argument against European engagement with Armenia, nor against the EPC concept in principle. It is an argument for institutional discipline — for aligning form with function, cost with outcome, and ambition with accountability.
Three reforms deserve the attention of European policymakers.
Fixed venue, rotating presidency.
The G7 has long demonstrated that substantive summit diplomacy need not entail the physical uprooting of governmental infrastructure across continents.
The EPC should establish a fixed institutional home — most naturally in Brussels, where the diplomatic ecosystem already exists at scale — while preserving rotating national presidencies to shape agenda priorities.
The symbolism of proximity to a given country can be preserved through dedicated bilateral summits held alongside, rather than conflated with, the plenary forum.
Mandatory outcome reporting.
Every EPC summit should be required to publish, within ninety days of its conclusion, a structured public document that sets out: commitments made at previous summits and their implementation status; the total estimated cost to all participating governments and EU institutions; and a frank, independently reviewed assessment of what was achieved that could not have been achieved through existing mechanisms.
Without this baseline, the EPC will continue operating as a self-referential performance without external audit.
Rationalised frequency and scope.
Two summits of this magnitude per year are neither necessary nor efficient.
A biennial plenary format — with ministerial-level working groups in the intervening periods — would substantially reduce costs, concentrate political attention, and impose the agenda discipline that the current format structurally discourages.
VI. Conclusion
Yerevan deserves European attention. The summit takes place following the historic Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement, as both countries embark on a pro-European course, developments of genuine strategic significance for continental stability.
EU investments in Armenia under the Global Gateway are expected to total €2.5 billion, and a new civilian EU Partnership Mission has been established to bolster Armenia’s resilience to hybrid threats.
These are substantive commitments, reached through institutional channels that operate with or without a summit in Yerevan.
At a moment when European governments are asking their citizens to absorb the costs of rearmament, the energy transition, and structural economic adjustment, the political optics of convening fifty heads of state in the South Caucasus for a one-day meeting with no binding outcomes, no aggregate cost disclosure, and a seven-summit track record of negligible collective deliverables are, to put it with diplomatic restraint, difficult to justify.
European leaders would better serve their constituents — and their genuine partners in Yerevan — by investing in durable institutional mechanisms that produce results long after the motorcades have departed, the communiqués have been issued, and the “family photo” has been archived alongside the seven that preceded it.
The views expressed in this analysis are those of the Anchorage Think Tank and do not represent the official position of any institution.
Anchorage Group Think Tank
Italia
