Welcome, everyone, to this latest instalment of the UK in a changing Europe podcast. This week,

I'm delighted to be joined by Mark Leonard, who is director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Mark, welcome. Lovely to talk to you. And my God, do we have a lot to talk about. I mean, firstly, let's put this into some context. I mean, you and I have known each other for an appallingly long time. And, you know, during that time, sort of periodically, you get talk about Europe's facing a crisis. This is Europe's decisive moment. Europe must act now or else it'll be too late. And of course, every time Europe hasn't

really acted and the world has continued much as before, are we at a turning point now?

I think we are because a lot of the core assumptions that Europeans had about how the world

worked, how they organised their economies, how they organise their security, how they organised their politics.

It basically collapsed and, you know, it's as much an identity crisis as a security crisis and an

economic crisis. And, you know, the costs are starting to become quite huge, whether it's the security challenges that at least

the third of European countries feel very directly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,

which makes lots of countries in Europe, particularly in northern and eastern Europe, feel

extremely nervous and uncertain about their future.

And countries like Denmark, which were the most Atlantis countries in the world,

are now worried that the US is going to be annexing some of their territory.

But you also have Germany, which is rapidly deindustrializing and seeing

the Chinese model of political economy as something which could destroy some of the core companies,

which are really central to German identity, if you look at what's happening to Volksfarke and to

Matzidis. And then at the same time, there is a real sense of political jeopardy in lots of

different places with far-right populist parties using migration and other issues to turn the political

debates upside down. And all these things are bleeding into one another.

And the economic prospects are also feeding into the political uncertainty.

So it is pretty different from some of these other crises.

You know, if we go back, you know, there have been huge things,

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