Enlarging and deepening: giving substance to the European Political Community

About the authors

• Franz Mayer

  Franz C. Mayer holds the Chair in Public Law, European Law, Public International Law, Comparative Law and Law and Politics at the University of Bielefeld (Law Faculty), Germany. He studied Law, Political Science and History at the Universities of Bonn and Munich, at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) and at Yale Law School.

  Visiting researcher Harvard Law School 2000; annual Visiting lecturer University of Warsaw since 2000; Visiting professor at Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) 2007 and at Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas) 2010; General
  Course Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence,
  2011; Senior Emile Noël Fellow, NYU School of Law 2011; Visiting professor of Law at Columbia Law School Winter term 2012/2013.

  His teaching and research interests focus on European constitutional and administrative law, on comparative law (in particular comparative constitutional law, with a focus on German, French and US law), on the
  relationship between law and politics (in particular - but not only - in the EU context), on parliaments in times of globalization, on internet law, sports law (European soccer law) and more generally on international law and public law (in recent times with a focus on the
  law of Free Trade Agreements and of Investor-State Dispute Settlement). More recently, he has worked on constitutional law aspects of Rent regulation Law in Berlin and Munich.

  His practical activities mirror his research interests. Professor Mayer was Counsel to the German Parliament in the Treaty of Lisbon-trial in 2008-2009 and in the first Euro-crisis case 2010-2012 at the German Constitutional Court. He is currently Counsel to the German government in the CETA and in the EUSFTA cases at Germany's highest court (since 2016 and 2019, both cases still pending), in the case on the Unified
  European Patent Court (since 2017) and in the case on the European Patent Office (since 2019, pending).

  He has frequently testified as an expert witness in parliamentary hearings on constitutional law and EU law. He has been teaching EU law to future German diplomats at the German Foreign Service Academy
  (Akademie Auswärtiger Dienst) since 2010. Since 2016, he has been a member of the German Football Association’s Federal Court (DFB Bundesgericht), ethics chamber.

  He has dual French and German citizenship and lives in Berlin with his family.

• Jean Pisani-Ferry

  Jean Pisani-Ferry is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel. He specialises in the economic impact of climate action, European economic policy issues and international collective action.

  His research covers macroeconomic policy (including the economic implications of climate action and post-COVID recovery), global economic governance and multilateralism (examining how multilateral institutions confront global asymmetries), European integration, monetary-fiscal union, the euro area’s reform path and national policy analyses, especially French economic strategy and public-investment agendas.

  He speaks English and French.

  He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute (Washington DC) and a Professor of Economics at Sciences Po (Paris). He serves as non-executive chair of I4CE, the French institute for climate economics. Pisani-Ferry served as Commissioner-General of France Stratégie from 2013 to 2016. In 2017, he contributed to Emmanuel Macron’s presidential bid as the Director of programme and ideas of his campaign. From 2005–2013, he was the Founding Director of Bruegel. Beforehand, he was Executive President of the French PM’s Council of Economic Analysis (2001-2002), Senior Economic Adviser to the French Minister of Finance (1997-2000) and Director of CEPII, the French institute for international economics (1992-1997).

• Daniela Schwarzer

  Prof. Dr. Daniela Schwarzer joined the Executive Board of the Bertelsmann Stiftung in 2023. She is a leading expert on European and international affairs and has had a 20-year career at renowned think tanks, foundations and universities.
  From 2021 to 2023 she served as Executive Director for Europe and Central Asia at the Open Society Foundations, the world’s largest foundation working to strengthen the rule of law, democracy and open societies. In 2021, she was appointed honorary professor of political science at Freie Universität Berlin. In autumn 2022, she was a visiting professor at Harvard University, with which she has also been affiliated as a senior fellow.
  From 2016 to 2021, she was director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations. (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, DGAP). Prior to that, she served as research director on the executive team of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and lead its Berlin office and Europe program. From 2004 to 2013, she worked for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, where she headed the Europe research group beginning in 2008. From 1999 to 2004, she was an opinion page editor and France correspondent for the Financial Times Deutschland.
  Daniela Schwarzer is regularly consulted as an expert and policy advisor. In 2023, she was co-rapporteur of the working group on EU reform and enlargement, convened by the French and German governments. From 2020 to 2022 she served as special advisor to the High Representative and Vice-President of the European Commission Josep Borrell. She also advised France and Poland during their respective EU presidencies and was a consultant to the French prime minister’s Centre dʼAnalyse Stratégique.
  Since 2025, Daniela Schwarzer has been serving as the honorary president of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations and as co-chair of the German-Japanese Forum. She is a member of the supervisory boards of BNP Paribas and Covivio, an honorary board member of DGAP and a non-executive board member of the Jacques Delors Institute/Centre (Paris, Berlin) and a Council member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). In 2017, she was inducted into the French Legion of Honour.

• Shahin Vallée

  Shahin Vallée is head of DGAP’s Geo-Economics Program. Prior to that, he was a senior fellow in DGAP’s Alfred von Oppenheim Center for European Policy Studies.

  Until June 2018, Vallée was a senior economist for Soros Fund Management, where he worked on a wide range of political and economic issues. He also served as a personal advisor to George Soros. Prior to that, he was the economic advisor to Emmanuel Macron at the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance, where he focused on European economic affairs. Between 2012 and 2014, Vallée was the economic advisor to President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy. This experience has put him at the heart of European economic policy discussions since 2012, in particular on issues related to the euro area and international policy coordination (IMF, G20). Having started his career working for social investment vehicles and entrepreneurship in Africa, he has also worked as a visiting fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based economic think tank, and as an economist for a global investment bank in London.

  Vallée is currently completing a PhD in political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York, a degree in public affairs from Sciences Po in Paris, and an undergraduate degree in econometrics from the Sorbonne.