 I'm giving a talk later to Ibeck, and the opening line of the speeches were at a defining moment in the history of the European Union. It occurred to me that I can't remember how many speeches over the last 30 years I've given which began with those same lines, because it seems to me that we're always, we have as many defining moments as we had in the European Union, as we had windows of opportunity in Geneva for the DOA development agenda. But it is, it's still true, sometimes the cliché is true, and I'm conscious that much of the focus is about the choice of personalities, the whole Spitz and Kandindatan debate, and these are certainly very important. And I'm also conscious that probably after the European Parliament elections, a sense of unhappiness with the way things are going in Europe, people are also very focused on, you know, it's the economy's stupid jobs and growth agenda, and this is very important. But today I would also like to make the case that, unfortunately, we have to walk in Chugam, we have to also keep a very close eye on the international agenda, which is frankly at the present time rather disturbing, and which will have profound implications for our internal situation over the years in the next few years, and which will have to be addressed. So I don't think that we can actually just focus on one agenda of domestic concern of growth, jobs, employment, very important and crucial as these things will be. But I think we're also going to have to keep a very close eye on the international environment. I, a colleague said as I was coming in, why I wasn't giving, setting up the EAS Part 3, because I think I bore you to death with lengthy descriptions of the travails of setting up the external action service in two episodes. Mainly because I'm sort of here to say, well, the job is done, I mean in the sense that the service is there and it exists, and fortunately I don't have to answer endless questions about the compatibility of IT systems or the recruitment of national diplomats into the external action service. But equally, I think, not only is the job done, but I think we have also had to address a wide range of issues. As you said, Mary, while we were setting up this service, the world has not stood still as it unfortunately tends not to do while we get ourselves in shape in Europe and this is something we could perhaps come back to. Let me just mention three areas of great change that we've witnessed over the last four years. The political transformation in our neighbourhood has been completely remarkable and frankly also unexpected. If you look at the Balkans, where the slow process of transformation and mediation is bringing a new hope of stability to the region, even if there are still problems. But if we look at North Africa, where entire populations have been overthrowing long and trench regimes but now face difficult and long transitions and with very uneven progress across the region. At the same time, the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting after Iraq and Afghanistan and in line with the pivot to the Pacific policy, decision makers and public opinion in the U.S. are certainly wary of military intervention in Europe's neighbourhood and the speech of Robert Gates when he was leaving the role of Secretary of Defence to the NATO could not have been clearer in terms of saying that the U.S. expected Europe to shoulder a much greater part of the responsibility for the security of our region. And recent events have shown that relations with Russia, which we had been a key cornerstone of our policy over the last 25, 30 years, have also been completely upturned with a much more assertive and unpredictable Russia. China has renewed territorial claims and disputes that we have thought had been buried under the economic success of East Asia and South Asia have suddenly resurfaced with frankly some rather graphic and surprising language being used by very senior politicians in the region with echoes of recrimination about the Second World War, which frankly I think many of us never thought we would hear spoken again, certainly not in the 21st century. On the positive side, we do see an increasing awareness of how tightly knit our global societies have become and of the need to look collectively at fighting cross-border threats such as the spreading of the financial crisis, the nefarious effects of climate change, the scourge of terrorism and piracy, or even the challenge of migration, which is an increasingly challenging issue in Europe, certainly, but also elsewhere. And the reality is that multilateral solutions to these problems, which is probably what we would as a reflex prefer, become, if anything, more elusive. Now, over the past five years, as Mary said, the EU has redesigned its institutions to improve its ability to act globally and has engaged in new and deeper ways in most of the major global crises. Firstly, at the institutional level, we have redesigned and strengthened our ability to act externally through the Lisbon Treaty, which ushered in some very big institutional innovation in the way that Mary has described. And I'm not going to repeat what Mary has already said. We set up the External Action Service as the support to the new role of the high-representative vice-president. Of course, we decided that that was the title that Cathy's role would take rather than Foreign Minister, which might have been slightly more comprehensible. And frankly, when I have to introduce myself as the chief operating officer of the European External Action Service, there is a distinct risk that my interlocutors fall asleep before I finished completing the sentence. Someone asked me last night, or I was talking to someone, said, why was it called the European External Action Service? And I had to confess that I fear the answer was to make a sound as unimportant as possible. But it now exists. It's in its fourth year of existence. And I think we have demonstrated that it is possible to combine the strengths and personnel of the Commission, the Council, national diplomatic services. And thanks to the work of Catherine Ashton, and I must say the trust of President Barroso and Van Rompuy, and I must emphasize the strong support from Member States. The one thing which has been a revelation to me coming into this job from, you know, 30 odd years, some very odd years of working in the Commission has been the strong sense of solidarity of Member States, foreign ministries with this process. And frankly, they could have reacted slightly differently. They could have taken a slightly different view that somehow this new bureaucratic creation in Brussels was a threat. I think maybe some of them think that privately, maybe when I'm not in the room, they talk like that amongst themselves. I don't think so. And certainly it's not the way they've acted, whether it was in the remarkable transformation of the Commission delegations into EU delegations, which happened more or less at the flick of a switch at one minute past midnight in 2009, or whether that has been the whole challenges of personnel, policy, budget and everything else where I must say the Member States could not have been more loyal or more supportive. And this has also strongly contributed to our ability to put the service together in a relatively short period of time. We've also strengthened our capacity to respond to crisis around the world and to put together crisis management missions and operations where we mobilise over 7,000 EU military and civilian personnel in around 30 missions which we've launched over the past decade. And our strength lies, I believe, in a comprehensive approach enabling us to combine diplomatic, political, military, trade, development and humanitarian actions. So if you like, the instrument has been built. I think the phrase I've used in the past is this is the hardware which flows from the Lisbon Treaty. And I think Cathy Ashton can, with some pride, say to her successor, whoever he or she may be, whenever he or she is appointed, I have built you a machine that you can now put to the use that you think is most appropriate. And her successor will not have to spend a disproportionate amount of their political and psychic energy worrying about actually setting up the structures. So if I look at beyond the sort of building of the machine, let me give you some examples of how I think we've been able to improve the way foreign policy shaping and implementation has improved over the last four years. Firstly, I think the Foreign Affairs Council, which is now separate from the General Affairs Council, as though we now have a dedicated Foreign Affairs Council, has been much more proactive and responsive. Foreign Ministers meet regularly, at least once every four weeks, sometimes more often. The High Representative sets the agenda, chairs the meetings. We've streamlined the preparatory process so that the Foreign Affairs Council is able to address all major foreign policy issues in real time, often, as I say, with extraordinary meetings or extra meetings, and generally a much more activist stance. Let me give a few examples. We see real-time coordination of EU positions and a new awareness for the need to work in closer coordination. And even in cases of initial political disagreement, for example, in the earlier phases of the Libya crisis when we had a hiccup at the UN Security Council that we all remember, closer interaction in the Foreign Affairs Council allowed us to share assessments and arrive at joint EU action, including the opening of our office in Benghazi, which was one of the first international missions established in Libya after the conflict. Through the adoption of targeted smart sanctions, the EU has been able to give strong, unambiguous signals of EU unity in different crises. Belarus, Ivory Coast, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, and now Russia, bringing our economic and technical strengths closer to foreign policy aims, and forming the basis for international alliances with other partners. Conversely, lifting the sanctions on Myanmar, and we were one of the first to do that, showed also how we are willing and able to respond to accompany positive transformations. And Myanmar has been one of the good news stories of the last couple of years, and I think the EU has played a very important lead role in facilitating that. Through close regular cooperation, a good understanding and a division of responsibilities has been achieved by foreign ministers, allowing the high representative vice president to entrust missions to certain foreign ministers on her behalf, and thereby multiplying our ability to act. Let me give one example, which is sometimes quoted in the opposite direction. When we were still trying to mediate a solution at the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis on the 21st of February, Cathy Ashton was chairing the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, adopting the legal instruments needed to impose sanctions on the Yanukovych regime, particularly for those responsible for the violence in Maydan, while the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany, and France were on the ground in Kiev, negotiating on her behalf the agreement between the president and three opposition leaders. Now, many people have said to me, wait a minute, why were the Germans, the Poles, and the French there, shouldn't Cathy Ashton have been there? Well, she could have been, except that we needed someone to chair the Foreign Affairs Council to adopt the sanctions that were, in fact, the pressure on the government to do a deal with the opposition. And in fact, for me, it is the perfect demonstration of how we get a complementarity between the union level and the role, the continuing role, and it will continue for a very long time to be important of national diplomacy, sometimes acting individually, sometimes acting as was the case in Kiev on those days, as a group of foreign ministers. And I can assure you that the phone calls between Cathy and the three ministers were happening literally every half hour to compare notes and to make sure that we were completely joined up between what was being decided in Brussels and what was being done on the ground. So it was, for me, a textbook illustration of how the Lisbon structures can deliver. Secondly, we're building a more joined-up policy making between Europe and the member states. Some very good examples here. The Antipyrus piracy naval operation off the coast of Somalia is now fully a part of a more articulate engagement with support to the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, EU operations for the training of national security capacity, EU diplomatic presence, our development cooperation programs, and wider regional cooperation. So on the one hand, we have a very successful, if you like, repressive element, which is the naval activity, and it has significantly reduced incidences of piracy. And on the other hand, we're very well aware that it's not just repression or stopping it at the end. You have to move upstream and see why young men jump on to speedboats with Kalashnikovs and how you deal with the problems at the origin of these kind of symptoms. The success in the Kosovo-Serbia discussions showed very close cooperation between the Council and the Commission and the very important personal role of Cathy Ashton. We have close cooperation with the United Nations in the region and close cooperation with the wider international community from the United States, even to Russia. And this shows how the stabilizing commitment or promise of EU membership can also help to bring about political change. The High Representative's role as Vice President of the Commission has ensured that there is a common purpose and shared understanding between the actions of the Council and initiatives considered by the Commission. For example, discussions on energy security and energy diversification were promoted by Cathy Ashton and by the Energy Commissioner in the Foreign Affairs Council to help set new priorities. And you've seen the role that Commissioner Uttinger has played in trying to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine on the gas prices, again demonstrating the complementarity between the role of the Commission and the foreign policy dimension. And the new structures, in my view, make this much more fluid than would have been the case if we had not made those changes. And I would like to say more generally, particularly in the presence of a few distinguished former members of the Department of Foreign Affairs here, that the whole reflex of the foreign policy community in Europe is now one of coordination at European level. This is the natural tendency of all foreign ministers. When there is a problem, the first thing they do is they ring Cathy and they say, Cathy, we need a European position. We need to react. Now, sometimes they're doing it because it's an issue of particular domestic sensitivity, and therefore, you know, that's why they take the initiative. Sometimes it's an issue of such grave importance that it's obvious that we need to do something. But the mechanisms of European political cooperation, which I remember with great fondness when we used to travel around the capitals of the presidency because we couldn't meet in Brussels, because of course it was not a European competence foreign policy, and the attempts to craft common positions on an occasional UN resolution. When I look at where we have moved from then in the late 70s to where we are now, it is a dramatic shift, a dramatic shift of a reflex of common European positions and trying to mobilize all the elements at our disposal from what the Commission can do, from what the Member States can contribute in terms of military assets or other contributions into a complete foreign policy set of toolbox. I think we have been very focused on mediation. We are a regional integration organization, and we speak and act on behalf of 28 members, but we don't represent a single country's viewpoint. We have access to military assets, but we're not a military power. We have soft power instruments from sanctions to stabilization funds from electoral observation to civilian administration reform. And with these assets and under the leadership of Kathy Ashton, the EU has increased its role as an international mediator and in consolidating and accompanying resolution to crisis. Our experience in these areas is growing from sharing the Iran talks where I think Kathy Ashton has done a remarkable job. The clock is ticking on the interim deal. She's heavily engaged this week in Vienna trying to transform the interim arrangement into a definitive arrangement. I think it's within grasp, but it is challenging to what we did in accompanying change in Burma-Myanmar from responding to the crisis in Mali in 2013 to our close engagement to help the political consolidation in Yemen, from the peace process in the Philippines to intervening with a stabilization military operation in Central African Republic. I think we've developed stronger partnerships with other actors, first and foremost with the UN where the EU has obtained a stronger role in the General Assembly and in the Security Council where it is now possible for Kathy Ashton and other EU actors actually to address the Security Council, something which would have been thought inconceivable not so long ago. And Kathy has in-depth exchange of views with the Security Council once a year and consultations between the EU and the UN before enduring peacekeeping operations or crisis management missions are now part of a new routine. We have a long-standing cooperation with NATO based on the Berlin Plus arrangements dating back to 2003. We share intelligence, we can use NATO capabilities for EU-led civil and military operations. We've launched two common security and defense policy missions under Berlin Plus, Concordia in Fireham and U4 Altea in Bosnia Herzegovina. It is, of course, not a secret to say that the tension over the Turkish Cypriot, Turkey and Cyprus problem does inhibit our ability to have the kind of cooperation that maybe both sides would wish. But I think despite these limitations, formal and informal interactions at political and senior official level have proven beneficial to both organizations. The transatlantic relationship has also been strengthened. I think Kathy's personal relationship both with Hillary Clinton and with John Kerry have played a very important role but there is almost daily process of consultation and coordination between the external action service and the State Department. And many face-to-face meetings coordinating our joint response to developments on all major international crisis spots. Just for the sake of completeness because, of course, the problem is when you give a list in this kind of speech, someone stands up at the end and says you didn't mention such and such a country. I think our relations with Asia have developed considerably over the last four years. We had a very important visit of the Chinese President Xi Jinping to Brussels. The first visit ever of a Chinese president to the European institutions, followed closely by a visit of Prime Minister Abe. And we have broadened considerably the agenda of our discussions with our Asian partners to include security issues. We've had joint naval operations of Somalia with China and are about to do the same with Japan. And we've considerably strengthened our cooperation with ASEAN also in the area of security cooperation. My speech here says the results are not always commensurate with our efforts. Yes, I suppose that is true actually. It then says with an exclamation mark but that's diplomacy for you and that's probably also true. The limits of what diplomatic activity can actually achieve on the ground are considerable and we have to recognize that. This is true of European policy, it's true of any national policy. I suspect it's even true for a superpower like the United States that you can start out with a great plan of how you want to influence events around the world but at the end of the day people are people and the dynamics of regional and national situations have their own logic at times which escape even the cleverest of diplomatic activity. So my message really is that I think we've done a lot over the last four years, I think we've built a machine and we've put it to fairly good use. As always the challenge is whether we're moving as quickly as external events would require and there I continue to believe that we have a tendency to be just slightly behind the curve because we still are a bit slow and we still haven't fully figured out just how much of foreign policy we really want decided and implemented at European level and how much we want reserved for space, for national activity and it's a very legitimate and important debate but my sincere hope is that in the discussions now taking place in Brussels around the selection of the new leadership president of the European Council, president of the commission, new high-representative vice president in the concept of setting an agenda for the next five years in response to some of the concerns that come through from the results of the European Parliament elections that in this there will be a clear commitment to more European action in the foreign policy field. We cannot be a spectator to these unfolding international events. We are a stakeholder, we have interests, we have values and we need to be active in the defence of our interests and in the projection of our values. Otherwise we will find ourselves at the receiving end of a world shaped by other forces and many of which will not be exactly to our liking. So I hope that this will find a new impetus or an additional impetus in the coming years and that the foreign policy agenda will grow and develop along with the rest of the Union's agenda by trying to address the concerns of our citizens. Thank you very much indeed.