This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcast to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Luke Van Midler.

Luke Van Midler is a historian and political theorist and well known to many people now as a former

speechwriter and advisor to the President of the European Council from 2010 to 2015.

His new book is called Pandemonium Saving Europe.

Welcome to the podcast, Luke.

Thank you, Paul. It's a pleasure. Right. Well, we've done this before. We did a podcast with your previous book, Alarums and Excursions. So this is a treat to be coming back on a second

occasion. Obviously, we're going to talk about the pandemic, which is the main focus of your book and how the EU, both the European Commission, on the one hand and the European member states on the other, handled the pandemic crisis and it's still handling the pandemic crisis.

But before we do that, I'd like to follow in the sense, the effect the logic and the sequence of your book, because you're very good at analyzing from a very

constructive, not a negative, destructive perspective, how the EU has worked since its inception

and how it is evolving. And we'll talk in a second about your concepts of rules politics and

events politics and how these two sort of coexist up to a point. So I want to

start with a quote just to get our readers into the mood. I quote as follows from your book,

the strategy of undermining drama and conflict and keeping it out of the picture proved effective.

This is the origins of the EU, obviously. But this approach came at the price of a steady erosion of

public and political powers of persuasion. The right to speak about Europe felt to economists,

lawyers and EU ideologues, who address themselves not to citizens, but to stakeholders.

With their jargon acronyms and self-congratulation, they drove even the most interested

members of the public to distraction.

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