My guest is Mark Leonard. Mark Leonard is the director and co-founder of the European Council and

Foreign Relations. His latest book is called The Age of Unpeace, How Connectivity Causes Conflict. First

all, welcome to the podcast, Mark. Thanks for inviting me. I'm a big fan of the podcaster.

Thank you, Mark. One of the things,

many things that intriguing me about your new book is that towards the end, kind of spoiler alert,

you do reveal that the book you set out to write is not the book you ended up writing.

So what, for the benefit of our listeners, have yet not yet had the pleasure reading this great

book. Tell me about the journey and the steps along

the way where you ended up in a quite different destination. Well, thanks. You're quite right.

I basically am a product of internationalism and international understanding. And my whole life

has been improved and made better by that.

Not unique in Europe, but I come from a family of German Jews on my mom's side and on my dad's

earliest memories were being evacuated during the Second World War.

His father fought in the First World War.

So being able to grow up in a Europe where these big countries

were at peace with each other without war, being able to travel without stopping at borders.

And then later on when I started work and set up a think time, be able to recruit staff

from across the continent and think about how European

countries could come together to solve a lot of the big problems that we face. These were all

things which I thought of as literally miraculous. That's why my first book was called Why

Europe will run the 21st century. It was a celebration of the European model. But then in 2016,

what I saw with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump was that many of the

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