Hi there and welcome to this latest episode of our Brexit and Beyond podcast and I'm delighted today to welcome

Professor Bridget Laffin, Director of the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies at the

European University Institute in Florence. Bridget, in case you didn't know, was ranked number 13

in the Politico Women Who Shape Brussels list. We'll get back to that later on. But she's also

a very, very well-known and prolific academic, who has published so many books.

I'm not going to go through them because I'm slightly jealous.

But anyway, Bridget, welcome.

A pleasure.

If we can start, I mean, there are so many things we can talk about.

I want to start off talking about the European Union.

Let's start with the vaccine program, shall we? I mean, what does the vaccine program taught us about the European Union. Let's start with the vaccine program, shall we? What does the vaccine program

taught us about the European Union? So I think that COVID-19, because you have to start there,

is one more crisis that the EU has faced over the last 10 years. So it's been a decade of crisis,

one to the other to the other.

When COVID-19 emerged, as we know, this time last year, March last year, the EU member states,

because they were in a panic, they hadn't prepared, they were worried about their ICU capacity,

about PPE, the things that have

concerned governments across the world. There was a rush to domestic solutions. But very

quickly, this appeared as if it would become a beggar thy neighbour. So there was a very concerted

effort, both by the Commission, but also in the Council, the European

Council, to make sure that Europe did not respond to COVID in a very fragmented way. The sort of

worst day was the week or weekend when the Italians asked for help under the treaties and no one responded. Never happened before,

...