With a growing geopolitical and geo-economic significance of the Indo-Pacific, the European Union (EU) has been shifting its attention to this region. Several EU member states – including Germany and France – have recently published their Indo-Pacific strategies, whereas the EU issued its own policy documents throughout 2021 and the European Parliament has just adopted the Report on the EU and the Security Challenges in the Indo-Pacific. Although South Korea does not have an overarching strategy for this geographical area, it is in fact one of the key Indo-Pacific players and the EU’s most important like-minded partners in the region.

To what extent do various strategies complement – or contradict – one another and in what sectors best to implement them? How can Europe collaborate with Seoul in order to maintain the Indo-Pacific which is free, open and rules-based while confronting mutual challenges such as China’s increasing assertiveness? What impact does Russia’s war in Ukraine have on the EU’s relations with the Indo-Pacific countries and what other partners and actors can the EU and South Korea team up with, especially since President Yoon has been recalibrating Seoul’s approach to its Indo-Pacific neighbors?

David McAllister, MEP and Chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, will give a keynote speech and will answer questions to open a hybrid event on the EU and South Korean strategies for the Indo-Pacific. The roundtable discussion will be joined by Dr Antoine Bondaz, Director of the Korea and the Taiwan Programs at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) in Paris, Prof. Eunjung Lim, Associate Professor at Kongju National University and Dr Tereza Novotná, Korea-Europe Center Fellow at Free University Berlin, Korea Associate at 9DashLine and EUROPEUM Prague.

 

Keynote speaker:

David McAllister

(MEP and Chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee)

David McAllister was born in Berlin on 12 January 1971. He is married and has two daughters.

After finishing his secondary school in 1989, he served in the German Military for two years. He studied law with a scholarship awarded by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation and has been a lawyer since 1998. In 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

His political career began in 1998, when he was elected as a member of the State Parliament of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). From 2003 till 2010 he served as Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Group and from 2010 until 2013 as Prime Minister of Niedersachsen.

He is a Member of the European Parliament since 2014 and chairs the Committee on Foreign Affairs. In this capacity, he is a Co-Chair of the Democracy Support and Election Coordination Group. He also serves as Co-Chair of the United Kingdom Contact Group.

As Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he is the European Parliament’s Rapporteur on the report on the Implementation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), which is presented every year. The report offers a strategic view on the European Union's foreign policy and formulates concrete recommendations on how the CFSP can be further strengthened.

Roundtable discussants:

Dr Antoine Bondaz

(Director of the Korea and the Taiwan Programs at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) in Paris)

Dr. Antoine Bondaz is a Research Fellow and the Director of both the Korea Program and the Taiwan Program at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS). His research focuses on China, Taiwan and Koreas’ foreign and security policy, and strategic issues in East Asia. He advises senior government officials as well as private entities in France and Europe, and participates in numerous high-level track 1.5 dialogues with top Asian government officials. He has testified before the French National Assembly and Senate, the European Parliament, the OECD, NATO and at the UN.

An Associate Professor at Sciences Po Paris, he also teaches at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Paris War College and the National Defence Institute of Higher Education. A Special Adviser to the President of the Delegation for Relations with the Korean Peninsula of the European Parliament (2017-2019), he was a Research Fellow at Asia Centre, oversaw the China Observatory for the Ministry of armed forces, co-directed the quarterly Korea Analysis, and wrote on a regular basis for the quarterly China Analysis. He was an Invited Visiting Fellow at Korea University in Seoul in 2012, and a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing in 2013.

Antoine Bondaz holds a Ph.D. in political science at Sciences Po with a thesis entitled "From Insecurity to Stability: China's Korean Politics from 2009 to 2014" (summa cum laude), under the supervision of Pr. François Godement. He has conducted field research in China, South Korea and North Korea, as well as 100+ interviews with leading academics and diplomats. He was a research grant recipient of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), funded by the Directorate General of Armaments (DGA), and was awarded several research prizes, including from the National Defence Institute of Higher Education (IHEDN) for four consecutive years, and from the Pierre Ledoux Foundation (Fondation de France).

Prof. Eunjung Lim

(Associate Professor at Division of International Studies, Vice President for International Affairs, Dean of Institute of Korean Education and Culture as well as of the Institute of International Language Education at Kongju National University)

Eunjung Lim is an Associate Professor at Division of International Studies, Kongju National University (KNU). She also serves as Vice President for International Affairs, Dean of Institute of Institute of Korean Education and Culture, and Dean of Institute of International Language Education at the same university.

Her areas of specialization include international cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, comparative and global governance, and energy, nuclear, and climate change policies of East Asian countries. Since 2018, she has served as a board member of Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control (KINAC), and currently serves as a member of Policy Advisory Committee for Ministry of Unification.

Before joining the KNU faculty, Dr. Lim served as an Assistant Professor at College of International Studies, Ritsumeikan University, in Kyoto, Japan. She also taught at several universities in the United States and Korea, including Johns Hopkins University, Yonsei University, and Korea University. She has been a researcher and a visiting fellow at academic institutes including the Center for Contemporary Korean Studies at Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo, the Institute of Japanese Studies at Seoul National University, the Institute of Japan Studies at Kookmin University, and Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.

She earned a B.A. from the University of Tokyo, an M.I.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr Tereza Novotná

(Korea-Europe Center Fellow at Free University Berlin, Korea Associate at 9DashLine and EUROPEUM Prague)

Dr Tereza NOVOTNÁ is a Korea-Europe Center Fellow at Free University (FU) Berlin and Korea Associate at 9DashLine. She previously held a Korea Foundation and Marie Sklodowska-Curie research projects on the EU and South Korea approaches to the Covid19 pandemic (“KOR-ON-EU”) and on the EU’s foreign policy towards North Korea (“EUSKOR”) at the Center for European Integration at FU Berlin. She is also a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the EUROPEUM, a Prague-based think-tank, which is focused on EU policies. In 2017-2018, Tereza was a Korea Foundation Visiting Professor at Seoul National University and Fudan Fellow at Fudan University in Shanghai. She collaborates with the Institute for European Studies, Université libre de Bruxelles where she held two postdocs from 2012 to 2017. Tereza received her doctorate from Boston University in 2012 and other degrees from Charles University Prague. She is the author of the monograph How Germany Unified and the EU Enlarged: Negotiating the Accession through Transplantation and Adaptation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has widely published on EU foreign policy in, among others, Journal of Common Market Studies, Studia Diplomatica, and on the EU-North East Asia relations in 38^th North, The Diplomat, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9DashLine, Asia Trends and others. Tereza has been a frequent commentator for media outlets such as Indus News, Czech TV and NK News. You can visit her website at https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/polwiss/euskor and to follow her on Twitter at @TerezaANovotna.

The roundtable discussion will be chaired by Dr Florian Pölking (Lecturer at the Institute for Korean Studies at Free University Berlin)

Time & Venue:

Thursday, 23 June 2022

10-11:30 am (CEST)

Hybrid event

Offline:
Institute of Korean Studies
Otto-von-Simson-Straße 11
14195 Berlin

Online:

Webex

Please register in advance

https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?RGID=r204332dc8457c32520d0f7dc53401d8f