Cleo Davies / Nov 2026
Photo: Shutterstock
On 12 November 2026 Ireland hosts the ninth European Political Community (EPC) Summit. Over 40 heads of state and government from across Europe attend the biannual EPC summits, with the leaders of key European and international institutions also joining. This summit’s official website describes the EPC as a forum for ‘informal political and strategic discussions’.
Although an intergovernmental forum, the European Council President will be co-hosting the summit. In fact, the European Council has always had a coordinating function in the EPC. After eight summits, its president is increasingly playing a political role. Whilst the European Council does not run the EPC, by lending it resources and a coordinating hand, it reinforces the EU’s growing capacity and tacit legitimacy to structure the European regional order, based on consensus rather than coercion.
The European Council as a facilitator
The European Council’s convenor power and resources are essential to the EPC. Summits hosted by an EU state are combined with the traditional informal summit of EU heads of state and government organised by the country that holds the rotating presidency of the Council. This minimises the costs, resources and efforts required to hold the EPC.
The European Council on occasion, also provides logistical support for the organisation of the summit by a non-EU state. And so far, all summits have been at the joint invitation of the European Council President and the head of state of the host country, except for the UK summit in July 2024.
In fact, the European Council President is playing an increasingly prominent role in the EPC. Antonio Costa has co-chaired the last three summits in Tirana, Albania, in May 2025, in Copenhagen, Denmark, in October 2025, and in Yerevan, Armenia, in May 2026. His cabinet is formally part of a coordinating mechanism that pools the current host with the previous two and the next one since the EPC in Tirana. Antonio Costa also took the initiative to invite the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, to attend the European Political Community in Yerevan. Politically, the President’s cabinet knows the value of the summit itself for projecting geopolitical messages.
Moreover, the most recent summits hosted by non-EU states have been anchored to the EU’s regional agenda. The summit in Tirana took place just after the EU-Western Balkans summit. The summit in Yerevan came just before the first ever EU-Armenia summit.
The EPC: more value to non-EU states than to EU member states?
At the same time as the European Council’s role has grown, the political value of hosting summits increasingly varies according to each state’s relationship to the EU. For non-EU states who choose to host, the formal and informal relationship to the EU has become central to how they use the EPC summit.
With parliamentary elections taking place just before the EPC summit in Tirana, Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama used the combination of the EPC and the EU-Western Balkans summits to bolster his electoral promise to join the EU within five years.
Similarly, the EPC summit in Yerevan combined with the first ever EU-Armenia summit to demonstrate Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan’s move towards deeper integration with Europe and away from Russian dependence, a month before the parliamentary elections in June 2026.
The summit in Blenheim in July 2024 was purely intergovernmental. However, UK used the EPC mainly to stage normalisation of relations with the EU and its EU neighbours, after the years of acrimonious divisions over Brexit.
Conversely, for EU member states, after the first EPC in Prague, summit hosting became entirely routinised through EU membership. For the rotating presidency of the EU, the informal meeting of the EU’s heads of states and government that precedes or follows the EPC summit is a more significant meeting.
Moreover, EU leaders’ attendance dropped quite significantly at the last non-EU hosted summit in Yerevan (see graph), while attendance from non-EU leaders has stayed constant. This may suggest that leaders from non-EU states see more value in the diplomatic instrument than some of their EU counterparts. For the smaller, non-EU member states, the EPC represents ‘a rare opportunity to be heard by Europe’s leaders on an equal footing’ in the words of Daniela Morari, Ambassador of the Republic of Moldova to the EU in September 2025.
The EPC in the European regional order
Back in 2023, Alexandre Adam, at the time adviser to the French President, called the EPC ‘a project that is more Westphalian than Strasbourg-based’. This is still a fitting formula today. On the eve of the ninth summit in Dublin, the EU remains more of a facilitator than an orchestrator of the EPC. The EPC is intergovernmental in form, but reliant on EU resources and institutions in practice.
However, through the EPC, the EU’s role in structuring the regional order is increasingly visible, in something akin to what Patrick Holden’s work calls ‘EU regional hegemony’. The EPC resonates with his idea of a primarily consensual hegemony, which captures the EU's capacity to structure political and economic relations across Europe, including beyond its membership, so that states position themselves in relation to the EU, even when it does not direct their choices.
The European Council's growing role in the EPC depends on leaders tacitly recognising its legitimacy to do so. It can coordinate the forum only because EU member states keep attending, which keeps the EPC a leader-level meeting first and foremost. That attendance cannot be taken for granted. Germany, initially sceptical, sent its chancellor to the first seven summits, yet Friedrich Merz skipped Yerevan. A spokesperson explained that the Chancellor was otherwise committed and already in regular contact with many of the participants. One absence is not a trend, but if EU leaders conclude that bilateral contacts do the same job, both the EPC and the EU's regional influence would weaken.
Intergovernmental in form, EU-dependent in practice, and sustained by consensus is what makes the EPC so typically EUropean.
