Why the European Union matters

“The European Union is, in a way, a treasure,” says Distinguished Brookings Fellow Javier Solana in this podcast. “It’s a treasure that really signifies peace, that signifies cooperation … the type of thing the global world of today needs.”

Solana, former secretary general of NATO and EU foreign policy chief, describes how he started as a physics professor before turning to policy-making and reaching the highest levels of Spanish and European institutions; discusses how the EU negotiates the shoals of nationalism; addresses the EU’s responses to the crisis in Ukraine and its approach to the negotiations with Iran; and offers his advice for success in navigating a global world.

Also in this episode, Senior Fellow David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, offers his regular “Wessel’s Economic Update,” focusing on the question of whether the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program increased inequality.

And, George Burroughs gets an update from Nonresident Senior Fellow Pat Mulroy on the water crisis in the western states. This follows the Brookings Cafeteria podcast episode with Mulroy, the “Vegas water czar.”

Show Notes:

• Sovereignty’s revenge: Populism and the future of European integration (event)
• Europe’s Sovereignty Illusion
• Javier Solana’s columns on Project Syndicate
• Monnet’s Brandy and Europe’s Fate, Brookings Essay by Strobe Talbott
• Saving Europe: Anatomy of a Dream (New and Expanded Edition), by Carlo Bastasin

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