Participation for EU officials and ministerial officials from the Permanent Representations of the EU Member States, ministerial officials from the EU Member States/candidate countries and interested parties
As part of its Europanetzwerk Deutsch programme, the Goethe-Institut Brussels invites you to a digital discussion group entitled ‘USA – EU: the current state of transatlantic relations’. David McAllister, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Dr Christoph von Marshall, Diplomatic Correspondent for the editorial board of Der Tagesspiegel, will discuss the current state of transatlantic relations between the USA and the EU, focusing on defence and security policy aspects as well as trade policy issues. The discussion will be moderated by Hubert Wetzel, EU and NATO correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
If you are interested, please register by 29 August.
David McAllister has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2014 and Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs since 2017, Co-Chair of the UK Contact Group, and substitute member of the Committee on International Trade. He is also a member of the Delegation for relations with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and a member of the Delegation for EU-UK Parliamentary Relations.
Before David McAllister was elected to the European Parliament in 2014, he shaped Lower Saxony's state politics as a member of the Lower Saxony State Parliament from 1998 to 2014. From 2003 to 2010, he was chairman of the CDU parliamentary group, after which the Lower Saxony state parliament elected David McAllister as Minister-President of Lower Saxony in 2010. He held this office until 2013. In 2014, David McAllister led the CDU as its lead candidate in the European election campaign and was elected to the European Parliament. In November of the same year, he was elected Vice-President of the International Democratic Union (IDU) in Seoul. He has been Vice-President of the European People's Party (EPP) since October 2015.
Dr Christoph von Marschall is Diplomatic Correspondent for the Editorial Board of Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper. His main areas of focus include international politics, power shifts between the major powers, the USA and transatlantic relations, the European Union and especially its eastern members, and relations with China and Russia.
He first made a name for himself as an expert on Eastern Europe: in 1989/90 for the Süddeutsche Zeitung from Hungary, and from 1991 for the Tagesspiegel as an observer of the integration of the states of Eastern Central Europe into the EU and NATO. From 2005 to 2013, he was the US correspondent and, since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the only German newspaper correspondent in the White House Press Corps. In 2017/18, he returned to Washington as the first Helmut Schmidt Fellow of the Zeit Foundation and the German Marshall Fund. He also observed the 2024 US election and its consequences in the United States.
Von Marschall is the author of several books. His latest book, "Black Tuesday. Why a war with Russia is looming and how the German government can prevent it," was published in 2025 by edition.fototapeta. He has received several awards for his work, including the German-American Commentary Prize in 2002 and the Karl Klasen Prize for Transatlantic Reporting in 2025.
Hubert Wetzel, born in 1971, studied political science and then trained at the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In early 2000, he became foreign editor at the then newly founded Financial Times Deutschland, and from 2003 to 2005 he was the business newspaper's political correspondent in the United States. In 2009, he returned to the foreign desk of the SZ, where he was deputy editor-in-chief from 2012 onwards. From mid-2016, Wetzel lived and worked in Washington for six years as US correspondent once again. Since the summer of 2022, he has been working in the SZ's Brussels office, reporting on foreign and security policy, among other topics.
