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

Right, hello and welcome and welcome back. It was my first week back in the office after a lovely holiday last week,

and it was a busy start because the EU was back in business

as well with the Bratislava summit with Jean-Claude Juncker's State of the European Union address

and so much more to talk about really. I'm sitting down today with Ian Bond, director of foreign

policy and Agatagoskenska Jakubovska, who is a research fellow here at the

CIA. And we're going to look back at the last week in EU affairs and try to make sense of it.

And I think what I want us to focus on in particular is on the one hand the results of the summit,

specifically what has been decided on EU defense cooperation, but also perhaps that how EU leaders plan to

deal with the Eurosceptic populism that is present, not just in Britain, and what Bratislava

tells us about the ongoing power struggles between EU national member states and EU institutions.

Bratislava was a special moment, a special meeting for the EU leaders, of course, because

it was the first time that they met at 27.

Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, was not invited.

And so many were expecting EU leaders to demonstrate the EU's credibility and legitimacy

even without the UK.

Agatha, how did they do?

Well, I think that the European Council President and his entourage,

they tried to manage the expectations.

I think that most EU experts agreed that we shouldn't expect too much

from this informal meeting, and we shouldn't expect too much from this informal meeting.

And we didn't get a lot from this meeting.

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