 What I would like to do is to give you my take, and it's a personal take, on the different ways by which the euro crisis has been, and still is, changing the European Union as a union. And I would like to go over four aspects of it briefly. First of all, how it has been changing, or qualifying some of our basic tenets about solidarity and sovereignty. And I think in a way there are two sides of the same coin. Secondly, what does the euro crisis mean for our future economic policy and policies? Then I would like to say a couple of things on redistribution of power inside the European Union. And then to conclude I would like to give you my sense of what has been happening in terms of how the institutions have been changing on the ground. Of course they have not been changing formally because they are embedded in the treaties, but a number of elements are shifting. First of all, I think we have been testing the limits of solidarity and the limits of sovereignty to the very full. The ones who had difficulty with more solidarity were the ones who had difficulty with the limits of sovereignty and vice versa. Still, I think that if you make the list of the different guarantees, or if you make the financial guarantees, or you make the list of the political capital invested by a number of leaders to try and keep everybody in the same club, you see that solidarity was quite impressive. But now two buts. First of all, if you look at this, what happened in terms of solidarity during the euro crisis? Solidarity, as you know, in Ireland did not come free. Particularly in the very beginning, when there was lending, it came at high interest rates. I admit that over time we succeeded in bringing them down again and that they were always accompanied by painful measures of an IMF type. That's my first, but the second but is that solidarity as well often was granted because the ones who granted it felt that if they did not do so, they would harm their own interests. So solidarity, if you look at it in terms of figures, was quite impressive, I think. But there is a double footnote to it and I can be brief about it, given the country in which I'm speaking now. The limits of sovereignty were tested as well. We have been, as an organization, as a union, been imposing fiscal discipline, which we would call budgetary discipline, economic discipline on subjects which in our welfare states are the bread and butter of winning or losing elections. I mean, if you see the number of constraints, the number of disciplines which are now coming into place, for instance, on national budgets, you must see that that means that an important part of budgetary margin of maneuver has been abandoned to Brussels. And this is the more important for a number of countries is that what you do with your budget, what you do with your salary policy, what you do with your pension policy is, of course, the stuff for which people vote in favor or against you. Now, as a consequence, of course, and there were a number of recent studies on that, the popularity of the European Union project are, let's say, it's not what it used to be, speaking as a diplomat. Does that endanger the project as such? Of course, answering that question is a bit of crystal ball gazing, and I'm not sure that my crystal ball is better than anybody else's. But I think that it does not really, at least for the time being, endanger the project as such for a number of reasons. If push comes to shove, and I'm thinking now about the Greek elections, people tend to take decisions in or to vote in function of their own understood best prospects for future. But there are limits to rationality as well. I admit that. I think the second reason why it doesn't endanger the project is that nobody sees what the alternative could be. And people are smart enough if they want to abandon something to first look at what they get in stead and in you. And then I think there's a third reason, which for me comes from 42 years of diplomatic experience, is that every time Europe was in a crisis, it ended up with more Europe and never with less Europe. Why is that? Will that always be like that? It's like asking the question whether Newton's apple is not going to fall upwards the next time. But I think we are seeing now, again, going through this crisis that it ends with more Europe than with less Europe. And behind it is a simple human factor, is that people and governments rather prefer to deal with predictable unpleasantness than with unpredictable unpleasantness. And it has been like that for 40 years. And I think what we have been seeing now proves that that is still the rule. Now, very personally, if we want to have further exchanges between solidarity and sovereignty, that will only happen if the right context is there and the right context is political union. Now, it may seem strange to many of you to talk about this subject now. But I'm saying, well, we have been testing the limits of sovereignty and solidarity. I think we will not be able to go much further than that unless you change the context. And the context then is changing the context means more integration, which is certainly the position of a number of government. But this is certainly not the position as important to the number of other governments. So that is my first point, testing the limits of sovereignty and solidarity. Now, my second point is about the economy, and particularly the economy in the euro zone. I think we have now bridged much more than was the case in the past. The distance, the gulf, which separated monetary policy from economic policy. We all knew from the very beginning when we started with the monetary union, and you can read it in the DeLorean report, that a stable monetary union needs a stable economic union. And we thought we could do the trick by putting two locks on the system, one budgetary and one monetary. Both locks were picked apart, both the budgetary lock and the monetary lock. And there we were with this crisis. In the European Council, leaders have tried to bridge, or to, let's say, to rebuild the locks. They have done a number of things, which were going to stay with us for many, many years to come. First of all, we restored budgetary discipline. And I wouldn't say that that means that all the existing budgetary trajectories are immutable. We had one adaptation in the case of Spain last year. But unilateral budgetary laxity, I think, has now become a thing of the past. It was practiced in the past 10 years with all the consequences we know. So I think that budgetary discipline has now become something for real. This creates, of course, this enormous problem of austerity, slow growth. And this is something on which the European Council developed an agenda for growth. But with the margins of maneuver which are there, if budgetary discipline is the rule, where are the margins? Now, some countries may have some margins. Germany led last year increase its salary policy by a much higher percentage than before. We have been using EU policies to try and get some growth. But the fact remains that we are confronted as a consequence with low and negative growth and with all the social consequences of it. And this is very much on the mind of the members of the European Council. But at the same time, nobody really wants to go back to square one. And again, come in the situation where budgetary laxity gives you a short-term growth, but then with the price to be paid afterwards. The second thing we have been doing to try and bridge this gap between the monetary and the economic is bringing much more discipline to national economic policies. And that is the discussion which is now going on. We did a couple of things like introducing the so-called macroeconomic indicators in the six pack. And we can discuss more of the particulars afterwards. And the European Council has now been working and continues working on what we call the contractualization of recommendations. Now, of course, this sounds very Chinese, and it is. But since very long, every year, the Commission sends economic recommendations individually tailor-made to each member countries, to each and every member country. And to some countries, it says you have to adapt your system of automatic wage indexation to other countries. It says you have to do away with the fact that you cannot fire people, and so on and so forth. All this is very well known, and this always has remained much of a bureaucratic exercise. The proposal which has now been made to have these recommendations into some form of contract between the institutions and the individual member states, presumably commitments to be approved by national parliaments, is an attempt to bring to the political level, to the level where people can decide. Well, up till now, our very intelligent, economically very sound recommendations, but which were recommendations, and recommendations, or recommendations, or recommendations. So that is what we have been doing to try and bridge this gap between the monetary and the economic, and make sure that this gap between the two becomes smaller, because if it remains too big, we remain with the basic difficulty we have discovered in the very beginning. Some people say that over time, and what is over time, our economies will become more competitive. If, of course, yes, you practice budgetary discipline, you practice a number of sound economic recommendations on your national economic policies, arguably that should lead to a more competitive economy. And that is, of course, the aim, because if our economies do not become more competitive or common future looks rather big. Does that now mean that we have all opted in in what some people call a German economic model? Yes and no. All these budgetary discipline, national economic policy disciplines are, of course, part and parcel of having bought into this currency, which comes together with an economic policy. But I have to say that a number of things which we have been doing, which the states have been doing, and which the Central Bank have been doing, we're totally new. The member states have created the safety net, EMS. We didn't have any EMS because it should not exist, it could not exist, and it was not to exist, it exists now. So that was highly new, highly unforeseen. The policies which the Central Bank has been following, like lately, the outright monetary transactions, have transformed as well the modus operandi of the European Central Bank. So you see, people say, well, we are just being dragged into a German-style economic policy. It's not entirely true because the reverse is true as well. We are doing a number of things, the ones I mentioned, which in the past would certainly not have passed muster. Maybe a third point on redistribution of power. There's a whole discussion in the European Union whether the Franco-German partnership has been transformed from an equal partnership into a senior-junior partnership. I think one should always watch out to be too black and whiteish about these things. It's obvious that when we are talking about the economy and given the origin of our common currency, that Germany would be in the lead. But I've been involved as well as Chief of Staff of France with the decision-making for the Libya campaign. And there it was obviously that it was Paris in the driving seat. So before we start having a kind of a general new rule about parity or non-parity between the two countries which are at the basis of the European Union, we should be careful not to take one event as being the harbinger of a general rule to come. It very much depends on the circumstances. As far as Great Britain is concerned and Prime Minister Cameron's speech, we certainly will have the occasion, given the time which we have to discuss about that in the second part of our meeting. Now I would like to go to my fourth and last points about the institutions. It's obvious that the European Council concentrates a lot of power. But that is nothing new. If you look at the ones of us and there are a number of them among us who have lived and participated in European councils before it had a permanent president even then, major decisions were always taken at the level of the heads of state and government. When Hermes van Rompijk became president, that of course made the embody to the decisions which the Treaty of Lisbon had taken with a permanent president, which gives you experience, which gives you authority, and which gives you more authority. He paid particular attention to two things. First of all, we never accepted the idea that the European Council should be the enemy, the battering ram against the Commission or the European Parliament. And I think this is not only a question of words. Everybody who has been following on a more daily basis what happens in Brussels knows that the president of the European Council has tried to develop a cooperative model with the other institutions. And behind it is the line of reasoning that the common interest is very badly served if the institutions are at loggerheads and that only if the institutions on a number of subjects have a consensus and a convergent idea is that only then and only then will they have influence in capitals in member states. But the fact remains, the European Council is and will remain one of the most important, if not the most important center of power and decision making in Brussels for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean the Commission itself, and I've now acquired a lot of competences, a lot of powers, budgetary powers, policy vetting powers. And this, the ones who say that this is a zero sum game, that the one wins is lost by the other having found wrong. If you see now for budgetary discipline how powerful the Commission is in the discussions with countries. Remember again the discussion with Spain last year. So the Commission cannot say that the fact that it has a powerful European Council is to the detriment of the European Commission, the European Commission itself, has been more present, which brings us, of course, to the question of the democratic deficit. And to the question of legitimacy. And to the question of the European Parliament, which being directly elected is the obvious standard barrier of democracy within the system. On paper, you can, of course, say that the whole institutional system is perfectly legitimized from the democratic point of view. Because, well, in European Council, Prime Ministers are heads of governments which have been democratically elected. So what is the democratic deficit? You can say the Commission, well, the Commissioners have been appointed by the European Council and the European Parliament itself, the fruit of direct elections. So I think when people talk about democratic deficit in the sense that mechanically there is a lack of democratic deficit, I think it's not a strong argument. I think it can be countermounted quite easily. But there is, of course, a real problem of the broader public opinion perceiving decisions emanating out of Brussels as being legitimate, as being mandated. And there, obviously, there has been a deficit for a long time and there is a deficit still, which, of course, in times of crisis becomes more visible because then everybody's attuned to what's happening in the course of this crisis. And people see that decisions affecting them on a daily basis are being taken far away. Personally, but again, I'm very much a European integrationist, I think this question will only be of legitimacy of Brussels institutions, legitimacy as opposed to the mechanical, formal, democratic legitimacy. I think that will be only addressed if we go in for further integration. But again, I show my colors. I'm a European integrationist. Then maybe to conclude, and I'm already speaking too long, I think, it's being, like so many of you, a professional national diplomat. I'm particularly attuned to see what it is or standing today in the international community. And it is obvious that as a consequence, and I was Sherpa to the G8 and the G20 meetings, and it's obvious that as a consequence of the euro crisis or international standing, took a hit. But at the same time, I'm an optimist. I've seen so many instances where a country international credit took a hit, but generally it only takes a couple of years before it's forgotten. So I wouldn't make too much of it. But there is something else. And it's strangely linked to foreign policy. The fact that we are not perceived as more being more integrated makes that difficulties in one country are much more easily perceived by the markets as being a beginning of the end. Or to make the same point in another way, if a state government in the United States goes broke, that doesn't endanger national economic policy and that doesn't endanger the currency, which proves that the same causes over there produce different effects. Because the paradigm they are operating under is elsewhere than the paradigm we are operating under. And the paradigm we are operating under is the paradigm of an integration which is somewhere halfway between one state, one vote, and one man, one vote, but which is certainly not accomplished. And there I would like to leave it at that. Thank you.