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The Centre for European Studies (CEUROS), together with the Department of Economics and the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, was pleased to welcome Jana‑Larissa Grzeszkowiak (Ruhr University Bochum) for the first event in this semester’s lecture series. The strong interest in the topic drew an excellent turnout, with attendees filling the venue and contributing to an engaging atmosphere.

Grzeszkowiak outlined how EU–Japan relations, despite formal steps such as the 1991 Joint Declaration and the 2001 Action Plan, remained polite but peripheral for decades, as Japan stayed primarily U.S.-anchored. Only after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis did the partnership gain momentum, expanding macro‑financial dialogue and encouraging Tokyo to hedge through closer engagement with the EU.

She showed how successive shocks—Fukushima, COVID‑19, and Russia’s war against Ukraine—shifted this slow-moving relationship into deeper cooperation across energy, health, sanctions, and economic security. These developments culminated in legally codified frameworks such as the EPA/SPA, the EU–Japan Green Alliance, and the EU–Japan Digital Partnership, linking shared values to concrete industrial and regulatory coordination.

Methodologically, Grzeszkowiak employs process tracing and crisis-based periodization, triangulating EU and Japanese primary documents with macroeconomic indicators and leader-level politics, particularly regarding sanction alignment before 2022. Against the constant U.S. reference point, she evaluates post‑2008 engagement as a spectrum between hedging and strategic convergence.

Her analysis concludes that the cumulative impact of these crises elevated a long-standing, low‑salience partnership into a structured pillar of economic‑security governance, shaping scenarios for resilience and de‑risking across Europe and the Indo‑Pacific.

The event sparked lively discussion and set a strong tone for the semester ahead.