Atlantic Council to award President Barroso
The Atlantic Council’s President Frederick Kempe announced today the first three of the recipients of its “2014 Distinguished Leadership Awards”, to be presented on April 30 of next year in Washington, D.C. The European Commission’s President José Manuel Barroso is one of the awardees.
Today the Atlantic Council announced that it will honour President Barroso for his “dedication to the cause of European integration and his role in ensuring that the benefits of that integration - stability, prosperity, and democracy - reach across an ever-widening vision of Europe”. It also said: “Assuming his office shortly after the ascension of ten new member states, President Barroso led the challenging process of integrating them into a still evolving Union, while also overseeing the inclusion of three more countries in the years since. He was a tireless advocate for the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, which strengthened EU governance and democracy; and through efforts to strengthen the European — and transatlantic — economy by building the EU’s Single Market, constructing new mechanisms for the Eurozone, and launching the effort to reach globally significant trade and investment accord with the United States, he has not shied away from any effort to bring more democracy and more prosperity to hundreds of millions of Europeans.”
For the past half century, the Atlantic Council has been a preeminent, nonpartisan institution devoted to promoting transatlantic cooperation on matters of global concern, including a broad spectrum of modern global challenges ranging from violent extremism to financial instability and from NATO’s future to energy security.
Each year the Atlantic Council honours several distinguished leaders for their versatile contributions to the strengthening of the transatlantic relationship. Last year, the award was presented among others to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.