On 12 May, the Geneva Graduate Institute hosted the awarding of the 2025 Dr Elemér Hantos Prize to Professor Dr László Bruszt, Director of the Central Europe University's Democracy Institute.
Alexander Swoboda, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute from 1990 to 1998, opened the evening by sharing a welcome speech, before Charles Epping, Chairman of the Central Europe Foundation, presented the 2025 Dr Elemér Hantos Prize to Professor Dr László Bruszt. Professor László Bruszt is Director of the CEU Democracy Institute and Professor of Sociology at the Central European University. During the regime change in Hungary in 1989, he served as National Secretary of the newly formed independent trade unions and has represented them in the Roundtable Negotiations. He started to teach at CEU in 1992 and has served as its Acting Rector and President in 1996/97. Between 2004 and 2016, he was teaching at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His publications focus on issues of regime change and economic transformation. His more recent studies deal with the politics of economic integration of the Eastern and Southern peripheries of Europe.
Professor Dr László Bruszt’s keynote lecture was entitled “The Enlargement Paradox: How Integration Can Undermine Democracy” and subtitled “Lessons from Eastern Enlargement and Ukraine on Markets, Institutions, and Democratic Resilience”. EU enlargement has long been guided by the belief that democratic institutions, once established through external conditionality, become self-sustaining. He revisited this assumption, arguing that the separation of economic integration from the continuous strengthening of political institutions — and the underestimation of the distributive consequences of Single Market integration, including the political uses of its corrective instruments — has, at times, weakened domestic support for democracy. Reflecting on the first wave of Eastern enlargement and the case of Ukraine, it suggests the need for a more integrated strategy linking markets, institutions, and social stabilization.
The lecture was followed by a conversation between Professor Dr László Bruszt and the audience moderated by Cédric Dupont, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
Click here for more information on Prof. Bruszt.
Click here to watch a YouTube video of the entire ceremony.