Professor Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and past President of the European Commission, predicted that the UK will rejoin the European Union, as part of a lecture at UCL.
Professor Prodi delivered the UCL Centre for Finance annual lecture to a packed room of UCL students, staff and members of the public last night.
His lecture focused on Europe's position in global politics, discussing where it sits between the global superpowers of the US and China, which he put into historical context by drawing on his own experience at international negotiating tables.
Professor Prodi was a professor of economics at the University of Bologna before embarking on a business career and subsequently entering politics.
He served as Prime Minister of Italy from 1996 to 1998, and again from 2006 to 2008 and is seen as a key founding figure of the Italian centre-left. He was President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.
In his lecture, he discussed how mixing foreign policy with ideology can cause problems, particularly when all sides tend to believe their own ideology is superior and needs to be exported. He suggested that Europe could be a useful negotiator between the increasingly ideological US and China.
He argued that the only way to export democracy is through democracy itself, such as in treaties where rules are agreed upon mutually rather than being imposed. He said that foreign policy should be like a bridge, where both sides respect the traffic rules of the bridge, while trying to find rules they both have in common.
Professor Prodi also discussed how geopolitics have changed across the decades, but with some themes arising again and again. He said that a lack of continuity of foreign policy under successive governments is one of the main problems in our democratic world.
After his talk, Professor Prodi sat down for a Q&A with the UCL Centre for Finance Director, Professor Antonio Guarino. When asked for his thoughts on Brexit, Professor Prodi said he expects the UK will rejoin the European Union one day, saying, "I'm betting that in 15 years, the UK will come back."
The UCL Centre for Finance is a research centre based in UCL's Department of Economics, with close ties to the UCL School of Management. Its researchers work on cutting-edge research in finance or at the intersection between finance, monetary economics, macroeconomics, economic theory, behavioural economics, and econometrics. The Centre's post-graduate degrees, all joint initiatives of the Department of Economics and the School of Management, are an MSc Finance and a PhD Financial Economics, alongside two newly-launched programmes, an MSc Law and Finance (also jointly with UCL Laws) and an MSc Finance with Data Science.
