Ask CER: Europe’s defence muscle, Russian-Western relations, CBDCs and the EU's green transition

*Running order below* In this week’s Centre for European Reform podcast, our media co-ordinator Rosie Giorgi put our listeners’ questions to the CER’s experts. She spoke to senior research fellows Zach Meyers, Luigi Scazzieri and Elisabetta Cornago, and the CER’s foreign policy director, Ian Bond. They discussed what central bank digital currencies might look like in practice; how the EU measures up against its global defence peers; relations between Russia and the West in the post-Cold War years; how close we are to implementing an EU carbon border adjustment mechanism; and the inclusion of nuclear and gas energy in the EU's taxonomy for sustainable investments. 01:32 What is a central bank digital currency (CBDC)? 05:17 Centralised vs. decentralised payments 08:24 How CBDCs might fit into the digital payments landscape 10:08 How does Europe’s defence spending compare against China, Russia and the USA’s? 14:30 The challenges for successfully implementing Europe’s higher defence spending pledges 17:22 The war in Ukraine: the situation in eastern Ukraine and EU support moving forward 21:40 How things got so bad with Russia after the break-up of the USSR 26:31 Did Western capitals get their approach to Russia wrong in the 1990s? 30:00 What’s the status of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism? 34:50 How did nuclear and gas make it into the eu taxonomy for sustainable investments? And how might this impact the taxonomy’s credibility on a global scale? The Economist article mentioned: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/01/nominal-spending-figures-understate-chinas-military-might