This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Bruce Stokes.

Bruce Stokes is the director of global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Centre.

Bruce, you've recently produced your annual survey of European attitudes towards Europe and fellow Europeans.

And this is picked up in the press by many as being a very favourable response this time,

that people in Europe are generally more favourable towards Europe.

But when you drill down into some of your data, the situation is not as quite clear cut as that, is it?

The favourability of the EU has been in question in Europe.

It's gone, it went down dramatically after the financial crisis.

It has bumped around for a number of years.

It began to climb back in 2014 and 2015, and then it took another dip in 2016.

But in 2017, there's been a real recovery.

And in the 10 EU countries that we surveyed, except for Greece, you have half or more of the population now have a favorable view of the EU.

And that's up dramatically even from last year.

For example, in Germany, the favorable opinion of the EU has risen 18 percentage points in one year.

There's a similar 18-point jump in France and a 15-point jump in Spain.

So that's pretty positive in terms of public opinion.

However, well, before I say however, I would say we also ask people about,

do you want to Brexit?

Do you want to leave the EU like the Brits are trying to leave the EU? And overwhelmingly people say no. So that's another potentially

positive thing for the EU. Only in Italy and Greece, do you get about a third of the population who say, we'd like to leave ourselves.

But still, it's only a third, and in other countries it's much smaller.

So there doesn't seem to be a Brexit infection going on.

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