From the Centre for European Reform, this is the CEO podcast.

It is a critical moment. If we do not act with urgency, we would then severely undermine the liberal order.

Brexit means Brexit, and we're going to make a success of it.

The wind is back in Europe's sales.

We have now a window of opportunity, but it will not stay open forever.

Hello and welcome to the Centre for European Reform podcast.

As you can hear, I'm not Beth Oppenheim, our usual presenter.

Beth has now moved on to work for Gisha, which is a human rights organisation in Israel. So congratulations to Beth, if she's listening.

My name's John Springford. I'm deputy director here at CR and we're going to do things a little bit

differently from now on. We're going to have a rotating cast of different researchers interviewing

each other on various papers and topics of interest. And today we have Christian Odendale, our chief

economist who is just in the process of finishing a new paper

on European sovereignty, which is the latest buzzword, really, alongside geopolitical

Commission that a lot of people in Brussels are talking about. As backgrounds, fractures

with the US under Trump, plus the the rise of China has meant that the EU has had to engage with power politics, probably in a way that it doesn't really enjoy, rather than its more cosy set of multilateral rules and institutions that were underpinned by US supremacy before 2016.

And the debate on European sovereignty has really mostly been about whether the EU can use market

size to drive up environmental and social goals or whether there's a greater role for the EU

in security and defence, given the fact that,

as I say, there are fractures between the EU and the US at the moment. But Christian, you say it's

all about the euro. As a macroeconomist, are you just jumping onto the bandwagon? Or does

economic stability matter politically and if so why?

Yeah, so the debate on European economic sovereignty I think is an interesting one.

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