Podcast: Europe's Coming of Age

New book interview with Loukas Tsoukalis

You can listen to my interview with Loukas Tsoukalis for New Books in European Politics about Europe’s Coming of Age (published on 14 October by Polity) on Apple or Spotify.

Born in Athens, Loukas Tsoukalis studied economics and international relations in Manchester, Bruges, and Oxford where he also taught before becoming a professor of European Integration at the University of Athens, then teaching at the London School of Economics, Harvard and the College of Europe. Today, he is a Professor at Sciences Po in Paris. Europe’s Coming of Age is the latest of his many books on the subject including The Politics and Economics of European Monetary Integration, What Kind of Europe? and In Defence of Europe: Can the European Project Be Saved?

Tsoukalis has written a book combining memoir, political history and proposals for the EU's future. In his view, the “benign conspiracy of liberal elites” has tested democratic legitimacy to its breaking point and “soft power reached its limits when it came nearer Russia’s hard power” - forcing Europe to come of age.

His book recommendations for my Writers’ Writers reading list are The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can't Coexist by Dani Rodrik (OUP Press, 2012) and Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanović (Belknap Press, 2019).