EU Strategic Autonomy: Views from Berlin and Paris on a more capable and self-sufficient Europe

Dr. Christoph Schwegmann is Senior Defence Advisor in the Policy Planning Staff at the German Federal Foreign Office. He is seconded from the German Ministry of Defence. Before that he was speechwriter and advisor to the German Chief of Defence Staff. In previous positions he worked in the Office of the Minister of Defence, in the NATO IS (PASP) and in the MoD’s Policy Planning Staff.

Manuel Lafont Rapnouil is the head of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs’ Centre for Analysis, Planning and Strategy (CAPS), France’s policy planning staff. He is a career diplomat, with a strong experience in multilateral affairs. He was also a visiting fellow for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

Sari Rautio serves as the Director for Security Policy and Crisis Management within the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland since April 2018. Previously she held the position of Director for EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (2015-2018) in Helsinki and the Deputy Representative of Finland to the EU Political and Security Committee (PSC) in Brussels (2012-2015). Her earlier assignments within the Ministry entailed security policy, crisis management, UN policies, and the Middle East.

Nicole Koenig is Deputy Director at the Jacques Delors Centre in Berlin. Her areas of expertise include EU foreign and security policy, institutional questions, and migration policy. Prior to joining the Jacques Delors Centre, she worked for the Trans European Policy Studies Association in Brussels, the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, as well as the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London.

Niklas Helwig is a Leading Researcher at FIIA. His research focuses on EU foreign and security policy, German foreign and security policy, as well as the transatlantic security alliance. Before he returned to FIIA in 2019, he worked at the RAND Corporation, at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS, Washington), at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP, Berlin) and at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS, Brussels). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne and the University of Edinburgh (‘co-tutelle’).