 First of all, it's great honour to be here. I've heard so much about the Institute, and I haven't been back here to Ireland since the Irish had the presidency back in 2003 or 2004, and a lot has changed since. So I've been saddled with this title, Germany's role in EU foreign policy and the challenge of Ukraine, which clearly means that foreign policy, European foreign policy and Ukraine are nearly becoming synonymous. But before we deal with Ukraine, which is a very touchy subject, especially in Germany, I just want to run through a few very important points which I think are crucial to try to get an understanding of how we see Germany's role firstly in Europe and then its relations with Russia and Ukraine. Because clearly the outcome of the Ukraine crisis has fundamental repercussions for Europe and indeed for the transatlantic relationship which I want to touch as well. Under Chancellor Merkel, who's been in power since 2005, we've seen quite a number of shifts, and one of the most exciting shifts was 2005 to 2008 when she did an enormous amount of work to repair the damage of Germany's reputation in Europe and indeed the transatlantic relationship and of course with Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. And from 2005 to 2007 she took a very strong stand on human rights issues on civil society, but essentially she put Germany back on the proper map, that it wasn't as awkward, it wasn't as anti-American as it used to be, it was reaching out to Poland which is an enormous foreign policy success story of the German government. And above all, she was in her element when Germany had the presidency of the EU in 2007 and during that year it had the presidency of the G8 and Putin was there as well. And Mrs Merkel didn't hide what she did. Was it Putin? Yes, and then maybe it came along then. And then it was a very kind of relaxed, excuse me, it was a kind of, it was an agenda driven coalition, even though it was a grand coalition with the Social Democrats and there was tensions between the Foreign Minister and the Chancellor especially over how to deal with Russia and China, Merkel actually achieved some of the things she wanted. And that was a kind of, in terms of foreign policy, a kind of re-continuity of foreign policy, get German respect in the EU again, German respect in Eastern Europe and German respect in Washington. And despite having the Bush administration there, and Bush really did get on with Merkel, she stood her ground over many issues, particularly Guantanamo Bay and the use of torture and human rights was her agenda then, which is very important. And she spoke up for Europe. European integration was still quite a buzzword at the time. And then came the Euro crisis and the Euro crisis, as anybody attending the council meetings in Brussels will remember, they just dominated every single summit. And there was no, foreign policy took a backseat, defence policy took a backseat. Issues, any non-European foreign policy issues, the foreign policy advisers really had very little work to do. And any work they did, any strategic thinking was relegated to the draw. The whole thing was to get over the Euro crisis. And of course Merkel came in for an awful lot of flack for this, because of her views. She stood firm. She, on the whole, how she saw the resolution of the Euro crisis, it was very touch and go where the Greece would stay in. She had very, very tense times with the Obama administration. But she stuck to her view that the Euro had to be saved and at any price. And we have seen that the Spaniards have paid a very high price in the Greeks and the Portuguese. The economies are slowly turning. We see this here. And we see perhaps that the Euro has been saved, but markets are very vulnerable things. And we'll have to see still how Greece manages this. But at the moment, there's a kind of, everybody's taken a deep breath and let it out slowly that this Euro crisis is, we are slowly getting on top of it. Which brings us back to, if this is the case, what about foreign and security policy? Here, it's less than a mixed picture. It's actually quite miserable. After seven years, the EU leaders, can you imagine, held a defence summit. The first time in six or seven years, despite the unfinished business in the Balkans, despite what's happening in the Horn of Africa, despite what's happening in the Caucasus, despite what was happening in Russia before the Ukraine crisis, we can take any number of crisis and at the defence summit very little was achieved. No pooling and sharing, no looking in the long term about Europe's interests and above all, there was no decision to actually establish a long term security strategy for the European Union. And the reason is that there are several countries that hide behind Germany didn't want this. Germany certainly didn't want it because it would mean actually defining a strategy towards Russia. And Britain doesn't think strategically anymore in many ways. France had its own interest not to do it. France has been focusing in any case on North Africa, Niger and Mali. And this would have to build this into the whole security strategy. But without actually a security strategy, the European foreign policy has remained in the same place for such a long time. Now, why is this? I think we have to say this that, I mean, it does behold Germany as the biggest economy and the biggest country in Europe to actually take the lead on these issues. Diplomatically and politically, if within the EU, Germany is actually punching way below, which is a great pity. Now, this is a no win situation for those that believe that they don't want German leadership. And this is a no win situation for those that do want German leadership. In other words, Merkel will be damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. And the Greeks and the Spaniards and the Italians and the Portuguese say, we don't want any more German leadership. We've had enough of German leadership before the euro crisis, whereas the Nordics, the Poles, the East Europeans, Lesley-Vide Britain, perhaps the Irish, the Dutch, that's a very different matter. They say, no, we do need leadership. We do need a strong European foreign policy. We won't be able to speak with one voice when we're doing very important negotiations with China, even with the Africa Union and with Russia. And yet, for the moment, Germany is not willing to take on this leadership. The public plays a role in this. The German public is very reluctant about the idea of leadership. It's partly because of their history, but you can always blame history and hide behind history in order not to make very tough decisions. And those tough decisions are about trying to set an agenda and trying to set what kind of role or perception Europe should have. At the moment, Europe, particularly in the Ukraine crisis, has become weaker, not stronger. And I bring up the Ukraine crisis because I think the Ukraine crisis is testing. We always say there's another test case, but it's actually testing how weak or how strong the European Union is. And at the moment, especially over the sanctions, the Ukraine crisis has showed up the very tense relationship between the United States and the Europeans and even more dangerous in terms of strategy, the enormous disunity among all the member states inside the European Union. And one of the reasons, one of the interpretations is that the Ukraine crisis is fundamentally about our relations with Russia. And there's a school of thought, and I share this, that actually with the exception of Poland, Germany and the German elites, but especially the social democrats who are still wedded in this Ospolitik, see Eastern Europe and Ukraine through the prison of Russia. In other words, the actions they take with Eastern Europe, particularly with Ukraine or Moldova or the Caucasus, is done in terms of how Russia sees it and how it might affect Germany's relations with Russia. It's not as clear-cut as this, of course, but they are very concerned about how President Putin reacts to anything the Germans say. Merkel has, for a German leader, been unbelievably critical of Putin and hats off to her for this, but has been very, very difficult with her because she has to weigh up the business interests, she has to weigh up keeping the coalition together, and she has to weigh up a fundamental question which the Germans haven't yet answered and is the role of the sanctions. And I remember having long discussions 10 days ago with the Foreign Ministry in Germany asking, you know, will you push for phase three? Will you support the United States on this? And the question they threw back to me is, you know, what is the aim of the sanctions? Will it make Putin tougher and more stubborn and more isolationist? Do we want to contain him? Do we want to deter him? What is our aim? And the Germans actually haven't answered this. And, of course, industry have been going their own way, visiting Putin, trying to reassure them that German industry will cooperate with Russia. And, of course, this makes Merkel's life even more difficult. This is the first thing. Secondly, countries can actually hide behind Germany when it comes to Russia. And the Dutch have huge energy interests with Russia. And, of course, David Cameron does an awful lot of rhetoric, but he won't even stand beside Merkel when it comes to even discussing what kind of sanctions to take. Merkel at least is open about the energy interests and the economic interests and the industry interests. Cameron is not open about how Russians run part of the city in London and how much would be lost for London if we did go down this road of sanctions. In any case, all I'm saying is that because we don't have a clear policy towards Russia and we don't have a clear policy towards Ukraine, Europe is very, very weak. And this means this is very important because the Japanese particularly and the Chinese are looking very, very carefully at how we react to this crisis. The annexation of Crimea really disturbed the Chinese. They didn't take this lying down and they were very critical of Russia at the UN Security Council. In fact, I think they abstained at one element. The Indians are looking at this. We know why. The Japanese are looking. They've got their own problems with China. And in some ways, the Ukraine crisis has much bigger global significance than actually we might have earlier considered. So anything, how the Europeans react to the Ukraine crisis and therefore Russia is very, very important in terms of how European foreign policy is perceived by the outside. And at the moment, it's getting very, very poor marks. The other aspect of these poor marks and it's going to be very interesting how this is going to pan out. When we talk of EU leadership, we say, well, you know, the council is quite weak. Merkel is quite weak. She doesn't exercise leadership. And we need leadership even more because France is weak and we don't know what France will all on is going to do with this economy. And we can't speak of Britain under Cameron. We have the whole referendum issue. We have the whole referendum over Scotland. In other words, there's very weak leadership in Europe at the moment, which is why we actually do need a much stronger voice by Germany in Europe. And secondly, and this is very, very important, we need this kind of leadership because the Americans are not prepared to stick it out in Europe. Yes, the Americans did some of the running belatedly in Ukraine and they've been very tough on Russia, but that's not the issue here. The issue here is that the American pivot to Asia is going to continue, regardless of the Ukraine and Russia crisis. The American pivot to Asia is going to continue, and this means that in some ways the security guarantees in Europe will remain, but actual American political engagement will actually decrease. And this should be a good thing that it would tell the Europeans, this is the time for European foreign policy to get stronger. This is the time for the Europeans to work with the Americans and think strategically, do some things together. But at the end of the day, this is the time for the Europeans to say, yes, it's, you know, how many years since 1945, we've depended so much on the Americans for our security. It's time now that we took our own security quite seriously. And we can, even in the Balkans, we're still dependent on the Americans and at the end of the day we're still not prepared to do this. This is a great mistake. The Americans have pleaded with Merkel and with Britain, has pleaded with Merkel actually to take a much more leadership role in Europe. The Americans have pleaded with Britain to actually don't leave Europe. And we know why. I mean, Britain, Cameron is living in a delusion that the old Anglo-American relationship is intact when we saw the debate and the vote in the House of Commons last year when the House of Commons just refused to support any American bombing campaign in Syria. So that one phase of this Anglo-American relationship is over, but at the same time Britain is not prepared to actually move back into Europe. And really it so much depends on how Anglo-American place our cards and trying to persuade English public opinion, which probably is lost, in trying to come back to Europe. So we have the US Pivotary Age of which will continue. We have an enormous crisis in Ukraine which will not go away after next Sunday. We have the continuing destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine by Russia. We have an EU neighbour about to collapse into a miserable and dangerous faith state. It's called Moldova, where the Russians are interfering in Transnistria. And the EU is absolutely unable to make any kind of impact in Moldova which is highly corrupt. We have a completely dysfunctional, I must say now, a dysfunctional European neighbourhood policy. We have seen through lack of understanding what was going on under Yanukovych, how we misplayed our cards with Ukraine. Essentially we have a highly unstable Eastern borders, highly unpredictable Southern neighbourhood, and we have an EU foreign and security policy which isn't functioning. What are our answers? Our answers are not next Sunday with the European Parliament elections. Our answers are, I think, our answers are for Merkel backed by the polls, backed by the Dutch, but this is not going to happen. And it won't happen with the French although Olan and Merkel are getting on better. But we need much stronger voices to actually define and work together where European foreign and security policy will go. If we don't do this, we're going to lose and the Ukraine crisis is actually going to get worse before it gets better, whatever the outcome of the Ukrainian elections. It's going to be more instability, there will be refugees, there will be people fleeing just out of fear, and we have seen enough fear from the Balkans and we can't have this repeated again on our Eastern borders. But I still believe that it's up to Berlin to tap this unknown potential of a new leadership of the 21st century rather than using the past to shun this leadership. Thank you very much.