from the Center for European Reform.

This is the CER podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the CER podcast.

My name is Sophia Bersh.

I'm a research fellow here at the Center for European Reform.

And this is our last podcast of the year,

where we will review the events of 2017 and look ahead at what 2018 might bring.

I'm with Charles Grant, director of the CER, Simon Tilford, Deputy Director and Ian Bond, who is the Director of Foreign Policy at the CER.

We have recorded a similar podcast last year, and so this time I will also confront the three of you with some of the

predictions that you've made 12 months ago so that should be fun. I want to start by looking at some

of the work that all of you have done over the past year some of the most seminal publications

from the three of you. Charles, shall we start with you? You've published a report about relaunching

the EU in 2017. Why was 2017 the right year to

relaunch the EU? Well, some of the problems have been afflicting the EU in recent years

have got a little bit better. The euro crisis is rather less acute. The Eurozone economy

is growing quite nicely. The migration crisis is a bit less bad than it was in 2016. The flows coming

in from Turkey and North Africa have diminished. And then Brexit, rather than leading to a chain

reaction, seems to have led quite the contrary to a sort of feeling of greater solidarity. So has Trump,

perhaps. So I think there's a feeling amongst many European leaders that with Macron elected

in France

since May, Merkel probably surviving in Germany, you have two strong leaders who can lead

a kind of revival of the EU. And there are some feeling in Brussels that that's the way forward.

...