On the 2nd of June, 2014, the Center for EU Enlargement Studies of the Central European University, in cooperation with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Budapest, organized the one-day conference entitled "The Quality of Democracy: 25 years later". The event was meant to commemorate the quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin wall and the adoption of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. The conference was dedicated to the Visegrád area countries, and their democractic progress, and the relationship they enjoy with the European Union 10 years after the 2004 accession.

CEU and CENS hosted the two-day “10 years in the EU – Taking Stock and Assessing Prospects” conference on April 14-15. As CEU President and Rector John Shattuck pointed out in his opening remarks, the conference was about both looking back on the past 10 years and looking forward to the future of European integration. The conference was an opportunity “to evaluate expectations, and to discuss how we got from naive EU optimism to current EU skepticism,” noted Jan Niklas Engels, director of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Budapest, the institutional co-sponsor of the event.