Mark Leonard is Executive Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a new pan-European initiative for policy development, advocacy and communications that was launched in October 2007.  Previously he worked as Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform, and Director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank he founded under the patronage of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  Mark has spent time in Washington as a Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences.  He is a prolific writer and commentator whose work has appeared in publications including Time, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Prospect, The Spectator, New Statesman, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, Country Life, Arena, The Mirror, The Express, The Sun, The Financial Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Wired. As well as opinion pieces he occasionally writes features for the Financial Times Magazine and The Spectator – assignments that have led him to seek out barbecues in Texas, prisons in Egypt and cutting-edge architecture in China. His first book, Why Europe will run the 21st Century, has been translated into 17 languages. Mark’s second book, What does China think?, was published in February 2008 by 4th Estate in the UK and by Public Affairs in the United States.