The economic crisis gripping Europe has thrown into sharp relief many of the issues surrounding the EU’s ‘big bang’ enlargement and future ones too. Attention is being focused on decisionmaking in a Union of 27, and on the influence or lack of it that the newcomers are able to exert. Other issues range from the role of structural and cohesion funds in the context of convergence policies, the expansion of the Schengen zone and free movement of labour to the future of the EU budget. Moves by some larger member states to limit the scale of EU spending from 2014-20, and therefore their own contributions, are provoking growing tensions among newcomer states already reeling from the impact of the economic slowdown. This roundtable, which will bring together some 40 expert discussants and 80 observers, will ask to what degree the Lisbon treaty’s innovations have begun to address the newer member states’ concerns that EU membership has not lived up to expectations. Are the 12 newer members becoming more familiar with the levers of power available to them in the EU’s institutions, and what are the political implications of diminishing public support for the EU among the electorates of many of them?Featuring:Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for Regional PolicyHervé Jouanjean, European Commission Director General for BudgetAlexander Alvaro MEP, Vice-Chair of the European Parliament Committee on BudgetsDariusz Rosati, Professor of International Economics at the Warsaw School of Economics, former Polish Foreign Affairs Minister and former MEPCarlos Coelho MEP, European Parliament Rapporteur on the Schengen Evaluation Mechanism and Member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home AffairsCo-moderated by Giles Merritt, Secretary General of Friends of Europe, and Daniel Daianu, President of the European Development Platform (EDP), Professor of Economics at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, former Romanian Finance Minister and former MEP