José Manuel D. Barroso was President of the European Commission from 2004 until 2014. Before that, he served for two years as the Prime Minister of Portugal and was the leader of the Portuguese Social Democratic Party from 1999 to 2004. Barroso has held Visiting Professorships at Princeton and Georgetown University and in 2015 was named Director of the Center for European Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal. He had already worked as a political scientist before beginning his career as a politician.

In July 2017, after the welcoming address by the Reform Rector, Prof. Dr. Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt, and the President of the Technical University of Munich, Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Wolfgang A. Herrmann, Barroso outlined the challenges facing the European Union in the coming years in his presentation European Politics and Governance in Challenging Times. „The European Union is a community of values – like freedom, democracy, human rights and we need to promote these values“ said Barroso. The former EU Commission President sees the cooperation between Germany and a self-confident France as an indispensable prerequisite for further advancing European values and culture. Solidarity and a sense of responsibility are key values for strengthening cohesion within Europe.

Andrew Moravcsik, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, is one of the world’s most renowned political scientists and conducts research in the fields of international organizations, human rights, European integration and the foreign policy of the United States and Europe.

In February 2017, Moravcsik opened with his lecture The End of the EU? Liberal Intergovernementalism in the Context of Current Crises, the speaker series Munich Talks. In his talk, Moravcsik diagnosed four crises in the European Union: the geopolitical significance of Europe, the emergence of right-wing populist movements, the migration movement and the macroeconomic performance of Europe. He considered European migration policy, the euro crisis and economic inequality to be highly sensitive issues that would occupy voters directly and, among other things, were reasons for the emergence of anti-European movements. It is therefore the EU’s most urgent task to solve the crisis of the common European currency in order to create more acceptance within the population for Europe. His answer to the question of what the future of the euro might look like: „Only Germans can decide.“ The event was organized in cooperation with the Munich Security Conference 2017.