My guest is Stanley Pickens, a Brussels bureau chief of The Economist and writes the weekly column on Europe called Charlemagne.

Welcome to the podcast, Stanley.

Thanks for having me.

Right.

Well, you were here 10 years ago working for the financial times and you recently come back to write this Charlemagne column.

Can I start by ask you, Stanley, what have been some of the main changes

that you've seen after your absence of 10 years? Well, Brussels is, since I've left, Brussels has

gone through a whole series of crises. When I left, it was really quite a miserable place. I left

just a few months before the whatever it takes of Mario Draghi. So Europe was in this protracted Eurozone

crisis, as you remember, and it wasn't clear how it would come out of it. And then since then,

from afar, I've seen a whole bunch of other crises. There was the migration crisis of 2015,

then Brexit, then COVID, then the war in Ukraine.

So you'd have thought that Brussels would be even more miserable.

But actually, I've come back to what I think is a much more confident city, confident

institutions that I think have handled each crisis a little bit better than the last.

So the Eurozone crisis was miserable for Brussels, in part because it felt like it had created the last. So the years on crisis was miserable for Brussels, in part because it felt like it had

created the problem and then had failed to fix it. Whereas if you look at COVID or the war in Ukraine,

at least those problems weren't caused by the EU and they at least have played some part in fixing

them. So it's been in a sense a happier city, though clearly one where the mood is

very much impacted by COVID and now by the war in Ukraine. Okay, so how does this confidence come across?

How does it manifest itself? Just better policymaking, I think. More a feeling that at least the

commission and the council, I mean, we can speak about the parliament later,

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