Hello and welcome to EU today, a podcast from the Center for European Studies, a Jean-Monnais Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thank you to the Erasmus Plus program of the European

Commission, the EU delegation to the U.S., and the U.S. Department of Education for supporting

our center and its programs. On this podcast, we sit down with scholars and policy leaders to discuss

pressing issues facing the European Union. We hope you enjoy it.

Our first guest on the show is Dr. Kieran Klaus Patel,

Professor and Chair of European and Global History at Maastricht University.

Professor Patel visited UNC to give a public lecture entitled

The Making of a European Alternative, Cooperation and Integration in Western Europe

after 1945.

On the podcast, we dive into challenges of European integration from a historical perspective

and learn about the legacy of 20th century German institutions.

Interviewing Dr. Patel is Stephanie Shady, UNC PhD candidate in political science.

So thank you so much for taking time to talk to us today. And so you are a historian of European history, German history, and you gave us last

night a great talk about how the European integration has changed over time, how it's evolved

and some of the reasons behind that. And so you pointed out that this is not the first time that

European countries have wrestled with questions of continental unity or how integrated economically, politically, that they should be.

And you discuss this in your 2018 book, Project Europa.

And so how do you view the present-day Euroscepticism in light of this history?

Should we be worried that this current trend is remarkably

different from the past or is it a continuation of the same? Right. I think it's a little bit of both

as so often. So there are also kind of early periods where there had been quite a good level of

...