 I just wanted to thank the institute for extending the invitation, for welcoming me so warmly, and also for enabling this conversation about defence to continue the one that's stemmed out of the December summit on defence, because it's often, until recently at least, one of those issues that tends to get slightly swept off the agenda, when economic issues and the everyday management of the financial crisis are on most European leaders' agenda. And I suppose even before what happened a couple of weeks ago, it was already becoming one of those long-term issues that defence cooperation isn't really a long-term issue anymore, because it causes a certain amount of short-term headaches. When we first discussed this talk with the institute over the phone a few months ago, we thought the issue was pretty topical to be honest, because of the December summit, because in the wake of the summit and in the run-up to the European elections we thought it might be nice to talk about European defence and European citizens and so on, it comes on the back of 18 months of pretty serious soul searching across the continent, across the capitals in Brussels as well, and it also comes before all the intricate negotiations about the changing of the guard in Brussels in coming months, which hopefully will bring a renewed sense of purpose on these issues included. So we were chatting about this and we thought we were in a pretty good place and it would be nice to have a bit of a shot in the arm before the European elections, and talk about citizens' perception of defence and so on. Little did we know, of course, that these issues would be set against a full-blown international crisis that brings basically all these issues now to a head and completely to the fore, in a manner certainly quite unprecedented since obviously the European defence project came to be and probably for some time before that. Obviously what's happening in the Crimea throws up some pretty searching questions from Vilnius to Lisbon and will continue to do so once the dust has somewhat settled and short-term concerns about Putin's autism and such, start crowding out the long-term ones. It's the recurrent questions if you like about, okay, obviously what should we do about it, but is there any way we can do that? If we can agree on what we should do about it and if we can agree, how do we do it and with what means and can we genuinely do it together and I suppose more profoundly some of the usual existential questions about European defence, what does it stand for, what do we mean by it? I mean, do we agree on the aims, the purpose? What do we want it to stand for? And since we're here in Dublin, I notice this because a 15-minute walk I got completely ported but I got completely drenched in rain so we must be somewhere near Dublin. I believe it's been pointed out in this very place in these hallowed halls that I suppose on this side of the Western world we like to think that the force of law trumps the law of force. But once you've said that, I would tend to ask, you know, how do you uphold the force of law in the face of someone who clearly has absolutely no interest in doing so? He doesn't necessarily play by the book of Western rules. He wasn't part of the gentlemen's club. I mean in this case is the force of law enough to sustain the force of law. I mean it provided you're in this side of the Crimea in a nice switch conference room, I suppose intellectually it's almost like a picture perfect example of how we conceive of and how we apply European values. So I suppose over here you would ask, well, do you sit back, we were talking about this a second ago, do you sit back and assume that Putin is basically shooting himself in the foot in the long term? Invest all you can in the Ukraine and basically wait for liberal democracy and the market economy to be their job. He'd basically assumed the kind of bumpy but teleological tendency of other people to want to become more like Europeans basically and somehow embrace Western values by dent of Europe's soft power alone. Or, you know, are the countries that actually don't want anything to do with Western value is I suppose appeasement, the tantamount to giving Putin a free reign over his purported sphere of influence. Do you need a range of other means and other instruments to protect the force of law and ultimately does Europe have the means to do so and to deal with such situations? I mean, I know over here I think we prefer the term crisis management to defence proper, which sometimes is, as in a few European countries is sometimes a bit unpalatable. Obviously it's extremely useful to be able to anticipate and to be able to prevent crises. You see that in most cases we don't really anticipate or are able to prevent them still. Obviously it's extremely useful to be able to once a conflict has passed to be able to go in and do the tricky work of rebuilding the justice system, rebuilding the security sector, rebuilding a state. That obviously is something that military force isn't going to enable you to do. However, in crisis management, we also have the aspect which is basically just managing a crisis and sometimes managing a crisis requires other means than trying to prevent it or trying to rebuild after it. The question is, does Europe have the requisite tools to manage such a crisis at its doorstep? Whatever the answers to these questions, I suppose what makes a bit of a difference to people in our line of work is that these questions are being asked and basically they're put on the table. Things are being flashed out at the minute because the usual complaint you hear from people like me is that there's no awareness or interest on the part of European citizens and therefore there's no political will to deal with these things. These issues get so very little visibility. People take peace for granted and forget the lessons of history because prosperity and economic growth have made us forget that there's a price to pay for peace. So on that there's no interest on the part of the Brussels institutions to talk about defence. It's not in their DNA that they always do too late. When defence analysts have finished moaning about all that, they then deplore the fact that there's no external threat that would compel Europeans to get their acts together on defence. Obviously you see where I'm going with this. On all these counts, I suppose first, it's worth noting that defence was put on the squarely on the table two years ago by Brussels institutions that are supposed to be slow and slag-ish. You can hardly complain that Brussels is being behind the curve on defence before this happened. In some respects, quite bravely, they decided to tackle the issues of defence and launch the whole process 18 months ago. From there, I suppose momentum has developed, we have a high-level political mandate that emanates from the December European Council, the highest possible political level in Europe, which is the heads of state and government. We have a calendar. We know what we want to do and when we want to do it. On frankly most of the important issues, and obviously these issues are kept on the radar and we're going to tackle them next year at the highest political level in the EU again. In a way, in this respect, you can't really, I suppose, accuse the EU of being reactive and being behind the curve because in this respect, to my mind, we've shifted from the back to the front foot. We also, of course, have the institutional tools now that hopefully this momentum that's been developing can help appropriate. We haven't yet appropriated the institutional tools of the Lisbon Treaty that we didn't have, for example, when the situation in Georgia broke out. Hopefully this dynamic can help us appropriate institutional tools that we actually have but are not using. Last but not least, well, there's been this basic Deus Ex Machina in this Crimea business in Hallelujah. We finally have this long-awaited external threat that people seem to be pining for. What this means, I suppose, is that, well, automatically there is a certain level of interest on defence matters. I was wandering around this morning and it's not just football on the front pages, but Crimea is in the headlines. There is a keynote, I suppose, interest and perception of Europe's environment, of how, if you like, it fits into its environment, a heightened sense of, I suppose, the European project, how valuable it is because people on the streets fighting for it and also how fragile it is. I would, I hesitate to call it this because I don't want to be flippant about it, but I suppose I would call it Wake Up and Smell the Racky, Racky being an alcohol from the east of Europe. So there's a sense that, I suppose, before this, Europe had been slightly, I suppose, navigating a strategic mist and it needed to wake up to the world around it and, if you like, to its purpose inside it. So I suppose, with Crimea, what's happened is there's maybe a heightened sense of self, maybe that's the abstract way to put it, but a better sense of how Europe fits into its environment and of what's happening at its gates and its neighbourhood. So anyway, long story short, there's a distinct sense here that all these boxes are being ticked. What everyone was moaning about suddenly, all these factors seem to be a conjunction of these various things. I think the Greek, we call it Kyros, seems to me that all the hurdles that were in front of us when we tried, when we were always pushing for more defence cooperation and more European defence and for more awareness of the facts by European citizens, are basically, all these hurdles are somehow fading. I mean, obviously it's early stages and we'll see what happens, but the idea then basically behind our research, what we were trying to do on European citizens and on European strategic cultures and such, was that the day that people were ready to take on these issues and to think about a more strategic role for Europe in its environment and in the world, then we'd have some basic facts for them, some reliable data, some solid stats that you could draw upon. Well, when the opportunity arose that all these hurdles might be clear, that we at least have some useful empirical data and I must remind you that it's going to depend a lot on I suppose the personality of the new high representative, but there is in the pipeline a strategic drive, a strategic effort which is going to be, we'll see how it works and it's not going to happen until the end of this year, but there is a debate that's in the pipeline about Europe I suppose ultimately rolled in the world. So, I'll briefly present some of the data we've had a look at, which mostly I suppose confirms and substantiates the contradictions and divergencies that I mentioned earlier over Crimea. Well, as you mentioned there are several strands of comparative data which we've tried to work on. I'll start with what we found on European citizens but actually that data also feeds into a broader effort which if I have time at the end I'll say a few words about because it's fairly unhelpful to look at these layers or strands in isolation because European defence is a kind of big pyramid of interdependent I suppose levers or stuff that needs to be considered as a hop. So in terms of I suppose what European citizens think about defence, the first astonishing fact for me because I hadn't looked into this data was actually how I suppose how high and how consistent the support for a common foreign policy and b common European defence actually was. If you have a look at the polls, basically the support for common foreign policy is anywhere between 60% and 70% in the last 20 years since the end of the Cold War and the support for common defence policy actually registers even higher between 70% and 80% consistently over the last 20 years. Obviously with some discrepancy between the member states which we've tried to log into in this paper here. You can have a closer look at the figures but basically what we concluded was that the numbers, so that's the first conclusion is that the level of support is surprisingly high. However when you kind of dig into what that means suddenly things get a bit more complicated. So when you ask whether European citizens want a European foreign policy that's independent of the United States, everyone says yes. And when you ask them do you want to invest more or cut less in defence which makes it possible to have a more independent foreign policy, people say no. I think that's become a bit more apparent over recent months with the cyber scandals and some of this stuff is extremely expensive. Unless you have drones that don't depend on basically American captors or whatever, unless you have independent cyber systems then it's very hard to have to lead an autonomous foreign policy. In the same way, when you ask European citizens and you have a look at the polls, everyone thinks that an enhanced European security and defence policy would provide you with a greater leadership role in the world. So basically everyone wants a common European security and defence policy and then when you ask them if in parallel they would like a common defence organisation which implies obviously that there's I suppose some constraints. It's not just the policy but there's an actual organisation then suddenly no one wants it anymore. They want the policies but they do want the constraints. If you ask them if we want a strong leadership for European world affairs, everyone says yes. We want a free, prosperous, powerful European Union that's able to influence world events. But then again there's some internal variation in the figures that I'm just talking about, consolidated European figures here. And then when you ask them, well sometimes are you prepared to for example brandish a credible threat of force in order to influence events without necessarily using force but for example using force to advance diplomatic means or sorry using the threat of force to advance diplomatic means credible, then there's basically 80% of Europeans oppose that. So there's a wise bed of version to using even the suggestion that you might use force. So the way we sum this up is basically saying that European citizens are keen to have a common defence but without the associated constraints. They're happy for the perks of global leadership to fall their way but without some of the unpalatable responsibilities that come with it. They strongly support strategic autonomy but not the costs it might incur. So in a few words, Europeans want in the abstract, they want increased global leadership and increased strategic autonomy with fewer common means, less investment, no conceivable recourse to force and no dedicated institutions or structures. So then it's a case of understanding what these discrepancies are all about and obviously to a certain extent there is a lack of awareness of I suppose what European defence actually involves and the costs it implies even just to ensuring the conditions of peace and prosperity in a given country. Sometimes that's basically the bread and butter of security and sometimes it's usually, even though it's the bread and butter, it usually doesn't come cheap. And one of the figures that we used to show that was that basically when you ask people what the level of spending for defence is in their national states, some people say 15%. So I know that when you look at budgets every day and stuff it seems completely outlandish considering that I think the only, depending on how you count these things, the only country who spends more than 2% of GDP on defence is probably Greece. 15% of GDP is like, well basically it's enormous, it's about 7-8 times what any member state would spend on defence. So basically there's a sense that well we don't really know what European defence means, what a European or common European policy on defence means, but we would like some of the benefits that's associated with it. And then actually when you dig further and when there is a realisation of what it implies, then you realise that when people know what it implies they don't agree on it. So the same divergences that appear in Crimea, for example, some people are more interventionist, some people less interventionist, some people are more Atlanticist, some people are less. So basically I suppose the double aspect of it is that we don't necessarily always know what it means and when we do know what it means we don't agree on it. So to finish up, I suppose I'll give you a very, very quick overview of the other strands that we've explored in parallel to this. I've basically made the fairly bold and autogullant rather silly assumption that European defence sort of looks like a giant bold of lasagna. You know what it is on the outside but you don't quite know what's inside. You can sort of distinguish the crust I suppose which looks nice, I suppose liberal democracy, human rights, market economies and stuff. And you can distinguish some of the lumps and the layers inside so you know that at some point Europe drew up a strategy for its external action. Some people know this. Some people know there's a defence agency that has a defence agency. We're not quite sure what it does and we're not quite sure what the relationship between, for example, its strategic aims and how it implements its defence policy is. But we know, some people even think that we have a drone army that's piloted by the commission president of Russia. This is across the channel so I won't navigate. But I suppose we're not quite sure how all of this holds together and whether these layers are hard or soft. We don't know if it's vegetarian or if there's muscle and meat in there. This makes me think of something I read in the paper yesterday, one of the main Russian newspaper I think, calling European sanctions on Crimea, vegetarian, herbivorous. We don't know whether what's in this lasagna is herbivorous or carnivorous. I suppose when you do know what the ingredients are to make lasagna, you always think you can make a better lasagna. Everyone thinks they can make a better lasagna in the south, in the north, in the east. It's quite apparent when it comes to Russia. If you talk about this with Poles, they will tell you about rationing cards and main battle tanks invading and so on. If you talk European defence with Italians, they will tell you that they see ships coming over from Africa and illegal immigration or whatever. And if you talk about European defence to people in the north, they talk about the Arctic and if you talk about defence in the middle, they'll talk about, we're not quite sure. They haven't quite decided yet. Anyhow, what we set out to do to remedy this kind of confusion and establish some of the hard facts was to have a careful and detailed look at some of these different layers of the lasagna. I do apologise for the metaphor. I have more sophisticated ones, but I quite like the lasagna metaphor. There are basically different layers. Underneath that crust, you'd have strategic cultures, strategic thinking. You'd have then perceptions of risks and threats, budgets, capabilities, operations. The layer, the citizens, is obviously the foundational level in many respects. What we did in a few words, this was a couple of years ago, we looked at strategic thinking across European member states. We looked into all member states' strategic documents and broke them down in one big database, which basically tells you what each country officially thinks about 30 or 40 issues which range from proliferation to terrorism to cyber security and stuff. I should really have a nice PowerPoint that I'm a bit of a dinosaur, so I have it in paper form. We have basically this big database about how European member states see their strategic landscape and what are the risks and threats and actually maybe 30 or 40 different items and then how they define their strategic objectives in return. We're currently extending that to India, Russia and Brazil. We're seeing how they support their strategic thinking. From there, we sought to draw some conclusions as to the different strategic cultures that we have across the EU. This we did with Nick Whitney at ECFR, who was the former head of the European Defence Agency, and we ended up with a kind of mapping all these strategic cultures across the European member states based on the study of their strategic thinking and this sort of database. I hope you can't see so you can't see where Ireland is because then I would have to justify it. Then what we did, I think Michael is here, last month we were in a room and we brought different people from all across the member states, brought them to Paris and asked them how they saw their regional environments, how they saw risks and threats, and to see if we could thrash out a common position with Cloda, who's also here. We compiled all the member states' defence budgets according to, I think for the first time to be honest, according to all the different sources, the main sources to the EDA, the LIWS, NATO and CPE to see some of the divergences and convergences. Again, it's that wish to have some kind of European leaders base their decisions on, make evidence based decisions rather than on moral imperatives that Europe should cooperate more or whatever. Actually when you look at the documents, when you look at the budgets, it's quite clear that Europe cannot, the member states cannot keep doing this, cannot keep having their defence policies so narrowly defined. They have to cooperate more, not because of a moral imperative, but because they can't afford it anymore. Lastly, on the operational front, which is the last layer of the lasagna, we compiled all the, this is quite interesting, all the codes of conduct of EU national member states. And it's quite useful to see the different reflexes, the different operational cultures for national militaries. And we actually asked ourselves what the code of conduct would be for an EU battlegroup, what would it look like. One other thing that should be interesting to compare is the mandates for deployment of national militaries, including in the European context. And comparing the capabilities as countries transform their militaries. So basically, in a word, it's kind of, I suppose it, all this is a bit empirical, sometimes a bit tedious, but it's fairly novel data which gives a nice picture of European defence as it actually works. Of the different layers and how they interact or not. For example, how strategic cultures or strategic thinking actually trickles down to the different, to the other layers, to decisions about spending, to decisions about operations, to decisions about capabilities. So I'm hoping to make this more available, I mean it's a work in progress and make it more systematic, see if we can set up a kind of monitoring mechanism that can be updated over time. And it's just basically so we can get our facts straight about this lasagna that European defence is and keep getting them straight going forward, in particular if you try and draw up a strategy for Europe. The last thing really is I just need to find a name for it. And to my great everlasting regret, I googled lasagna project and it's actually already taken. And what it's more, it's financed by the European Commission. Google it, you'll see. Thank you very much.