Passions: Europe

Mark Leonard believes in Europe with a faith rarely seen in Britain. In Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century he challenges us to regard the European Union not as a tangle of bureaucracy but as a revolutionary model for the future and to remember that, founded to protect us against war, it is now key to the spread of democracy.

Mark Leonard  is Director of Foreign Policy at the London-based Centre for European Reform where he writes on Europe's relations with the United States, the Middle East and China. Until the beginning of 2005, Mark was Director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank he helped found at the age of 24, under the patronage of Tony Blair. Immediately before that he worked as a researcher for Demos, where he ran the Europe programme, as well as writing the Britain ™ report which is credited with launching "Cool Britannia".