Welcome to EU Untangle, the podcast that untangles EU policy and politics. I'm Victor Aguilair, your host.

And I am Alex Roth. We have a great episode ahead of us. Yeah, we talked a great deal about

EU topics in the past, from AI regulation to EU elections and even geographical indications.

But today's episode goes back to basics.

What does it mean and what does it take to be part of the EU?

Just a little disclaimer, if you're tuning in hoping to hear the latest hot

goss on EU accession negotiations, you're not in the right place here.

For instance, we won't be able to tell you if and when Ukraine will join the EU. Yeah. If you're here for those reasons, get out of here.

But what we want to do in this episode is we want to provide some basic facts and

untangle indeed what EU membership means for the member states, for the Canada countries

and of course for the EU itself. Let's roll, baby.

We want to remind you that EU Untangled is an independent podcast by me,

Victor Aguilar and Alexander Roth. It means all opinions

that we express in the podcast are solely ours and cannot be attributed to any third party.

Alex, I guess a good starting point for this episode is to understand what the European Union is.

How would you define what the EU is today?

Vic, you start with the easy questions on the start of the episode.

You know me too well.

The European Union, so the EU is, you can call it a group of countries that have agreed on a set of rules, for instance, in which they do certain things.

They agreed on having a common room where trade is easy without any tariffs.

They even have agreed on certain political institutions, for instance, the European Commission,

the European Parliament and the European Council to create laws.

...