The book Retrospect and Prospect on the Development of the European Union: Selected Papers to Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Shanghai Institute for European Studies, edited by President Xu Mingqi and Secretary General Yang Haifeng, was published by the Current Affairs Press in August 2021. The Shanghai Institute for European Studies (SIES) is going to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its birth, and this anthology is part of this celebration, which gathered the latest research outcomes of the members of SIES in the field of European studies. Over half of the papers in this anthology are written by these relatively young scholars. In December 1991, the Maastricht Treaty was signed and the European Union was established. Therefore, an institutional foundation was laid for the deepening and eastward enlargement of the European integration. The integration mechanism of the European Union for common governance of the Europe is an integration mechanism that can be viewed as a complex polyhedron, which reflects a European effort to create a new and innovative model for handling internal and external challenges. The theoretical and practical meanings of this effort deserve continuous explorations by our scholars of European studies. The Europe is a region that always generates new ideas, new perceptions, and new issues, and the soft power of European Union in state and global governance should not be underestimated. Therefore, it is important for us to take sufficient and effective researches on the sources, projections, and influences of the European Union’s soft power and to establish an accurate understanding of its status, role, and trends in the whole globe. In this anthology, our scholars touched all these issues from different perspectives.
