Hello and welcome. My name is Sophia Bash and you're listening to the CER podcast.

Hello, I'm Ian Bond. I'm Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform.

And I'll be talking to Agata Gostinska Jakobovska and Camino Mortera Martinez

about the Rome Summit commemorating 60 years since the signature of the Treaties of Rome. So Agatha,

if I can start with you, the Rome Summit declaration will apparently refer to unprecedented challenges to the EU. And certainly

there are plenty of them, the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, protectionism in the US,

Syria, the Balkans and terrorism, which is very topical today in London.

And then there are some challenges that probably the declaration will not mention explicitly,

particularly worries over the strength of democratic institutions in central European countries like Hungary and Poland.

So does the EU have any reason to open the champagne and celebrate in Rome?

Obviously, the EU has been bested by a number of crises that you just enumerated.

But if we look back into the continent's history, undoubtedly, the European project has been a very successful peace project.

What the European Union managed to achieve, I was basically bringing peace, maintaining peace

on the continent, but also promoting democratic values and human rights outside of the EU borders, something that perhaps not

everyone is perfectly happy about when the EU has been talking to China or to other third

powers. But I think there is no question that the EU has been a power of example. The problem

is that many European citizens who were born, you know, after

the fall of the Berlin Wall or after the fall of the iron cart. And they simply do not remember

what inspired the founding fathers to work towards the United Europe. So I think that when European leaders meet in Rome, they should definitely remind the younger

generations that the EU has been actually the longest, or basically the 60 or even 70 years,

has been the longest peace period in the continent's history.

Well, that's a very good point about the past, but what about looking forward?

...