Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to this latest instalment of our Brexit and Beyond podcast. And I'm delighted that our guest to usher in this new year is Chris Bickerton, who's a university lecturer in politics

at Cambridge, an official fellow at Queens College. Hi, Chris, how you doing? Hi, Annan. Not bad,

thanks. Chris is very annoying, I mean, from a personal point of view, because he's like a child,

and he's published so many books that have been so well received that I can't

help but be slightly irritated by it. I want to talk to a little bit about those books. And I want to

start off if that's okay, Chris, with what I thought, I remember thinking as I read it was just a

fantastically ambitious book that you wrote, which was about member states as opposed to nation states. And I read it was, just a fantastically ambitious book that you wrote, which was about

member states as opposed to nation states. And I suppose it was about what European integration

does to the states that are part of it. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. You know, I can't claim to

be sort of precocious anymore. I'm now 41 Anand, so those days are long behind me.

But yes, I mean, that book, I suppose what I was trying to do with that book was to

change a little bit the way I thought that we tended to think about the European Union,

which was, and this is kind of an example, I

suppose I didn't give in that book, but I've given often, is that we think of it as kind of as

like a mirage. It's like this thing out there, usually out there in Brussels, a set of institutions.

Some people think of it as a kind of overpowerful super state. Some people don't. But it's this thing out there.

But a bit like a mirage, as you're going to get closer, you know, it sort of shimmers a bit and you

get closer and closer. By the time you actually get to the place, it's just disappeared.

And I've always thought that the use a bit like that. By the time you get to Brussels, you do have

buildings, you have institutions. Some of them are fairly powerful. But the thing itself is not out there. I can have

associated the European Union as a union of governments, of states. But, and so that's what I was

trying to do was to re-centre the way we think about the EU, to think about it as what are the units that make it up, assuming, and this is my view, that there isn't this all-powerful centre located geographically in Brussels that lords it over the member states.

...