What does the European Union's future look like?

There's a lot of bad news about the future of the European Union: economies still reeling from the recession, rising nationalism, what some think is an unwieldy bureaucracy in Brussels. But what does the future of the EU actually look like?

As the European Council prepares to meet in Brussels next week, we look at the sustainability of the EU.

In Forbes, Robert Kaplan argued he doesn't "believe that the European Union is merely a phase in history:"

It is the beginning of a regional grouping of sorts, united in universal values, that, while not ever truly united from Iberia to the Black Sea, will be a pivotal factor in Europe indefinitely. This will especially be the case in future years as Russia loses dominance in energy markets, suffers from a declining population and calcifies further under autocratic rule. The vision of Europe's elites a decade ago was too ambitious, but that does not mean at all that the age of the European Union is past. The European Union has a brighter future than Russia does.

J. Brian Atwood, professor and chair of global policy at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, joins The Daily Circuit to discuss the latest.