This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Mark Leonard.

Mark Leonard is the director of the European Council for Foreign Relations.

Mark, back in 2005, you wrote this pretty famous book now,

Why Europe will run the 21st century.

What were the reasons, or the main reasons why you were so confident then that Europe would in will run the 21st century. What were the reasons or the main reasons

why you were so confident then that Europe would in fact run the 21st century?

Well, I thought that the European Union had stumbled upon something which was pretty

amazing, which was changing the nature of politics in different places.

And I kind of argued in the book that this way of thinking

about how political power could be organized

was the most profound change since the creation of the nation state

500 years ago.

And it was a way of basically

getting countries to give to get access to kind of size and bulk that you need in in areas

where you have to be really big to be competitive so having the biggest market in the world

being able to work together

or to tackle climate change and organised crime and other things where size matters.

But at the same time, to keep the things that people really care about, organised very close

to the people. So the EU has no role in dealing with setting tax levels or delivering services

or pensions or other sorts of things. And I sort of thought that this model which the EU had

developed, which basically changed the rules of how countries worked together, moved away from the idea that

countries wouldn't interfere with each other's internal affairs, that they have a balance

...