Danuta Hübner is a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. She has three decades of experience working on the European Union (EU), US-EU relations, and the bloc’s global engagement. Hübner has served in the European Commission, the European Parliament, and European Council, as well as in senior government roles in Poland.

Hübner began her political career during Poland’s transition to democracy and a market economy in 1989. She helped shape the systemic and structural transformation of Poland’s economy, advocating policies promoting competitiveness and aligning the country with the EU and NATO. She served as a deputy minister for industry and trade between 1993 and 1995. In this role, she introduced the first Polish policy for small- and medium-sized enterprises and an industrial policy based on competitiveness.
Hübner was the chief negotiator of Poland’s accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1995 to 1996. She was the under secretary general and executive secretary of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva from 1998 to 2001.

Hübner led Poland’s efforts to enter the EU. In 1996, she established and oversaw the institutional structure to deliver Poland’s accession to the EU, and she was Poland’s first minister for European affairs from 2003 to 2004. She led Poland’s accession process and helped build public support for the country’s entry into the EU. After Poland’s accession in 2004, she was the country’s first European commissioner, initially responsible for trade and then for regional policy.

In 2009, Hübner was elected to the European Parliament and reelected in 2014 and 2019. During her time in the European Parliament, she served as the chair for the committee for regional policy (2009-2014) and the committee for constitutional affairs (2014-2019). She was responsible for the parliamentary consent procedure regarding the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU and chaired the monitoring group on the withdrawal agreement (2019-2024). She was also a member of the committees for international trade and for economic and monetary issues (2009-2024).

Since 2009, she has served in the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States and as a member of the EU-US trade monitoring group. In 2023, she was elected chair of the EU-US delegation and of the legislators’ dialogue. Since 2009 she was also part of the Transatlantic Policy Network, chairing its Steering Committee on the EU side until 2024.

Hübner is a board member of several European think tanks. She is a professor of economics and was a faculty member of the Warsaw School of Economics in Poland. She has been awarded five honorary doctorates and received five honorary orders from EU member states.