Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanna Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we're going to talk about treaty change and NATO membership.

Susanna, you covered the story of Macron's perhaps surprising speech at the beginning of the week,

surprising in the sense that very few journalists were briefed,

when he made a rather ambitious proposal about the future of the EU. Do you think this has legs?

Well, we had your intelligence. We looked at these proposals and so, well, with sort of a mixture of

excitement and concern. Exc concern excitement because he's the

first big country European leader who comes up with this idea after decades of denying that

sort of this role of a political community and being all drawn down into the rule of law debates

and here he comes Emmanuel Macron in Strasbourg, evokes this kind of political community,

a community for European countries, to be clear, in either accession status or not even,

we don't know yet.

But definitely the ones who are about to be candidates

for the EU to offer them a perspective, to have a sort of a way of engaging with them on political

and security matters. And obviously that's sort of a hand reaching out to Ukraine. He was mentioning that we all know that these accession negotiations, they take ages.

It's a technical thing.

They have to go through various chapters.

And even if Ukraine fulfilled 70% of the association regulations, it's the last bit of these things that they might find very

difficult, especially if the war draws on to show that you're a robust economy and have all

the security issues and place, the rule of law, things in place that will be very tricky

for them. So to offer them a perspective where the Europeans are coming together with

candidate countries and everyone who's wanting to join, and also actually extends to the UK

...