_
Unfortunately, we want to admit or not, in our country, engineering structures are designed and constructed under technical regulations that are older than 50 years without or with minor improvements. Hence, their innovation has been and still is the highest imperative in our engineering profession, thus the emergence of Eurocodes can be seen as an opportunity to compensate for the decades-long stagnation in the field of standardization. The announcement of the Government Decision on September 2, 2020, opened the possibility for Eurocodes to be used in the design. Therefore, this paper aims to promote the Eurocode as the most modern standard worldwide which regulates the design and construction of engineering structures. In the first part of the paper, special attention is given to the current version of Eurocode 7 (EN 1997) which is one of the ten related standards responsible for geotechnical design. For that purpose, a “cross-section” of the standard is made while the basic design rules are described together with some key provisions and recommendations. The second part of the paper talks about the next, second, generation of Eurocodes that is already being drafted and is expected to bring significant changes and improvements. Initially, their promotion was scheduled for the period 2021-2022, but due to the pandemic, the deadlines have been extended and now they are expected to come out somewhere between 2023-2025. The main goal of the second generation of Eurocodes is to improve the existing ones by uniting the design approaches in a single one regardless of the material or design situation. Moreover, they will improve in terms of their ease of use, the number of national parameters (NDP) will be reduced and new calculation techniques will be introduced using numerical methods and probabilistic design concepts. The proposed changes will be particularly significant in Eurocode 7, which will be reorganized into three almost entirely new parts. Finally, with the adoption of the Eurocodes, we started a new era in construction, an era that brings unification of standards, quality and safety of buildings. Namely, they will significantly improve the technical regulations following the experiences, practices, and scientific and research achievements of Europe in the past 50 years, but most importantly they will bring us closer to the EU standards.
