 OK, ladies and gentlemen, you're all very, very welcome. I shall allow our chair, Brian Robinson, to introduce our panelists. But obviously, to thank all of them for joining us this morning. And we have one more speaker who will be joining us a little bit later in the morning. My name is Ben Tomra from University College Dublin, along with Mary Cross and Patrick Keating. I'm a co-chair of the Security Defense Working Group here within the Institute. And as you'll be aware, this is the third of three expert seminars we've been running on security defense and small states. The first of those seminars was focused on looking at the threats faced by the European Union, small states in general, and Ireland in particular. The second of our seminars then looked at the capacities of the European Union, again small states in general, and then again Ireland, our capacity to contribute to security. So what we're trying to do today is square that circle. We're trying to square that circle by looking at how the Union, small states in general, and again Ireland matches or deals with its threats with their capacities through what kind of strategy. So what we'll be asking to do a little bit later on when you break out into small parallel working groups is to look at how the Union, small states in general, and Ireland, what kind of strategies are available to us to square the circle between threats and capacities. What are those options? Is there an evolution in those options? Do we need to think about change in those options? And what kinds of roadblocks lie between us and achieving the kinds of strategies that will, as I say, match our capacity to dealing with the threats that we face. As you'll be aware, we have a number of blogs from our contributors will be published on Monday. There'll also be a briefing paper from this working group. And we'll hope to take these themes on in the future. But as I say, at the end of this session. So without any further ado, thank you again very much for coming. And I'll hand over to our chair, Barry Robinson. Right. Thank you very much, Ben. And good morning to everyone. As Ben has briefly indicated, this is the final act of the Northshire Trilogy. And he has indicated he's recalled, of course, what the purposes and what the focus of the two previous events were. As he indicated also, we are completing the exercise today by looking at strategy building for small states on European security and defense. And the program follows the normal format for the series with one exception. Due to his travel arrangements, our keynote speaker, Sven Biskopp, will speak during the final session rather than at the outset of proceedings. We're relying on EU integrated single market transport networks for just in time arrival of Sven for his address. Before I introduce our panelists, a few housekeeping points. First of all, may I ask you all to switch your phones to silent and leading by example on that myself. Secondly, the opening discussion of the panel and the keynote address later in the program will be on the record. Conversely, the Q&A session is under Chatham House rules which means that participants will be free to use the information received but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speakers or those of any other participant may be revealed. And this format is intended to encourage frank open and free flowing exchanges. We begin with the panel discussion and I'll introduce each of our distinguished panelists in turn and invite them to make their opening remarks which will provide nourishing food for thought for the ensuing questions and answers session. I begin with Heidi Moore. Heidi is EU politics lecturer at the Department of International Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She's also a senior CEO or fellow at St. Anthony's and participates in the activities of the European Studies Centre. Her research to date has focused on European foreign policy, Europe's role in the world, and EU politics. She was previously a fellow in EU and international organizations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. And she holds a doctorate from the University of Vienna and I might say in passing that while preparing for this event, I came across an interview that Heidi gave to the UACES, I think it's the Academic Association for Contemporary European Studies, on diplomacy, gender, and what was described as project-based learning, but I think it's more problem-based learning, isn't it, really? Yeah. And which I would commend to you if you have 20 minutes, I think it would repay the investment. Heidi, if you'd like to. Thank you very much. Shall I go there, no? Yeah, yeah. Or then maybe it's easier, but just these people can also see people a bit better. First of all, thank you very much for hosting us. Thank you very much for joining us. And also a special thanks to Klo Dach, your team, and also the Institute for making this cooperation possible with Nordia. So we spend a minute, we still have a discussion if it's Nordia or Nordia. After three years, we didn't settle that yet. But Nordia is our network on research and teaching EU-front affairs. And it's a three-year engagement of 10 universities and the University Association for Contemporary European Studies, where we not try so much to push our research forward, because we do that anyway. But where the aim is more to trade discussion, on the one hand, with early career scholars, with policy makers, but I think also more and more with political elites and the public. And I think in this regard, we are very pleased that in this third year, we can be here and can have this discussion, I think, which is very timely on small states secured in defense. And in this regard, I also want to give a special thanks to Ben Tonva, who is a very inspiring source for our network and keeps pushing us forward in our academic debates to think differently about secured in defense, but also gives us always great ideas of how we can make this conversation with policy makers more fruitful. Because I think, also as academics, not only the teaching side, also on the outreach side, I think we have still a lot to do in thinking of how we can best do that. So thank you very much to the Institute and to Ben for having us. The way I will look at security and defense of small states in the next eight minutes, approximately, is more that I come more from a foreign policy side, and especially from a EU foreign policy cooperation side. So I leave the security and defense details to the other experts. But I wanted to share with you three themes that I think came out of many discussions in the last few years about how foreign policy cooperation on the EU level changed, also what that means also for security and defense. And Ben was joking that maybe it was a bit in a bad mood when Ben came up, also with the blog post that will follow. But in the end, I want to talk about the danger of smallness and this danger of taking this notion of small and turning it into a very convenient collectivism in the European Union to say, well, we are all small, so maybe we should be small together and look away at what's happening in the world. And maybe that also can sometimes be and a good excuse for a lack of vision and inaction. And maybe that's a bit of an extreme, but I still think that sometimes it's to push this argument a bit that, well, we are all small states in the EU. And I think there was a very nice quote from a Danish minister who was saying, well, in the EU, we have small states and we have those states who are small and don't know it yet. He got reprimanded by the UK. But I actually think that there's really something very useful to think about in this quote in terms of, well, yes, the EU is made up of smaller member states. But the big question is how do we now, with the small elements together, create something bigger? And how do the small elements together think bigger together? And I want to make three points. The first one for me is that, well, what we see happening is that there's what I call a lot of smoke, but maybe a bit too little fire. So there is actually a lot of activity in the foreign policy domain, in Brussels and also in the member states. But especially in the 10, 15 years, you could see that it got a bit business as usual. There's a lot of technical cooperation. In preparation for the meeting, I was going through the Foreign Affairs Council conclusions and the agendas of the Political and Security Committee in Brussels. And the amount of topics that they're covering and in the end, the quantity of things that they cover in these meetings is remarkable. When I compare that to 15 years ago, it's really, you see, a lot of things that I actually discussed, a lot of things are going through the system. But, you know, once you really look a bit more into detail, it's sometimes like, yeah, that's all sounds very nice, but actually, do I really care? Maybe, as an academic I do, as a citizen, I'm sometimes not so sure. And that's what I mean with, you know, sometimes it seems a bit that in the European Union, we have, on the one hand, this hype, yeah, we have PESCO now, and I think we'll come back to this topic. And yes, it will change certain things in the member states. It will be a very useful tool on also the Defense Fund in helping those member states who want to reform anyone. But I find it fascinating that there's no talk about, so once we have better defense and structures and capabilities, what do we do with them? What is actually the aim of those? And, you know, what are our criteria? Maybe with, you know, again, with nuances because we have different member states. And I remember a very good event a few years ago where we talked about Nutella in Austria, Finland in Dublin, in Ireland, exactly here. So, you know, of course, we will have different standards that member states want to keep up. But I find it fascinating that everyone talks about capabilities in this technical side. But where's the politics? Where's the political side of saying, well, you know, what do we actually want to achieve with that? And what I find interesting in this regard, I had one of my professors, over the 1977, I wrote about European political cooperation, so before CFSP, and he always termed this notion, well, what we see is procedure a substitute for substance. And it's really interesting that he wrote this in 1977, but I have a lot of colleagues who come still back to this, that what we see in European policy cooperation, that common foreign security policy, but I think also in the security defense thing, is a lot of coordination, a lot of cooperation, a lot of exchanging on technical retards. But again, if you think about what are the big political objectives on the CFSP, do we really know? And you could say, well, we had the global strategy, but I assume there are a lot of policy makers in the room who will also agree with me that, well, yeah, it's a nice document, but does it actually give us a vision of where European policy cooperation should go? And I think that's really something very important to think about. Where's the politics? In my teaching, I always do an exercise with my students. So the first question I give them is, name me three, four ministers that you know from any time period that you want to, that you think were really important or successful. And I'll be make the list. The second question is, so now name me the 28 Four Ministers of EU. And these two lists don't overlap. So I think there's also, and I think we know this from research, there's also a general notion that foreign policy is losing in the thinking of governments. This idea that we need vision in foreign policy. And it can not just be governing, but it really has to be the statement ship, a state woman ship, if you want to say it, is important. And I think what we really see also in the EU, in the EU circles in the last five to six years is that there is a lot of procedures. We did a research on the political and security committee. In the past, we meet twice per week. It was really difficult for us in the last year to get any interviews because they keep meeting every day. So there is a lot of activity. But again, does this activity actually give us something bigger where we say, okay, from this activity, we know where we are heading. And if it doesn't come from the system and from the bottom up, well, at the moment, I don't see a lot of political leadership on the top that would give us this vision. So I think this is really an issue that we should think about. The second point that I want to make, and I will speed up a bit, apologies, is again, a bit this idea that, well, also for member states, it seems a bit that they go to Brussels and they do stuff there, but how much do they actually change at home? And I also noticed when I was thinking of, okay, what research do we have about member states really actively changing their policy, changing their security and defense strategies in the past 20 years? I think we have a tendency to pick those member states that are very active because then we see things happening. And again, as academics, I think we like things because then we have lots of empirics and we can really make conclusions. But what we forget is we have 27 member states and there might be two active ones in a certain field. But what is about the rest? I'm originally from Austria and we just got the new government now. So we went from a conservative right wing to a conservative Korean government. And I was going through the coalition agreement. Unformed policy, nothing changed. It's business as usual. Just before I went back 15 years and again looked at the foreign policy side. We are neutral and then there are different nuances of how the government's interpreted. We want to cooperate in Europe, but you know, subsidiarity. It's always the same issues. How can it be that 20 years have passed and Austria didn't really change anything in what it wants to achieve? And that's just one example. I think we will be able to come up with a lot of other examples in the European Union. And linked to that, there's one issue that I start really getting concerned about. First, I was a bit puzzled. Now I'm more concerned. And this revival of sovereignty as an issue that might stop our cooperation. And I think that is also thanks to the British a bit. You know, we all talk about taking back control and we have sovereignty concerns. And as a political scientist, this really bothers me because in the past we always talked about national concerns. You know, you had interest, everyone understood, especially also in the CFSP, in foreign policy cooperation that well, of course, geography matters. The past, the culture of countries matter in how they position themselves in foreign policy issues. And sometimes there were strong national issues that others had to consider and that others were willing to consider because everyone could understand where the country was coming from. But you know, this idea of a national interest inhibiting you to go further in European foreign policy cooperation is something else than saying, oh, I have a sovereignty concern and that's why I don't want to cooperate. And I really, I find it really fascinating that this revival of sovereignty as an issue because as a political scientist, sovereignty for me means that the country is covered in a way that people have to say, oh, that's a representative democracy or a democratic democracy. At no point in time, sovereignty meant that you can be a country that closes yourself off and then just hope that you get whatever you want on the international. That's not sovereignty. And I think that's again, in the Brexit discussion, you see that very strongly, this idea that, yeah, we want to do whatever we want and you know, if we don't get what we want, we don't cooperate. And again, what I find interesting is the UK is the extreme example. I think you see it there, but UK it is more and more for member states also on other issues. We were at a seminar in Vienna where we talked about the Russia sanctions and we talked, for example, about the global conflict on migration. And again, time and again, you have few member states who use the sovereignty card. Yes, we want to cooperate but we have concerns about our sovereignty. Not about national interests but about sovereignty. And for me, the interesting thing is if you put the sovereignty card on the table, you pretend that you have another solution to get the same goal without cooperating. And I think that can't work. I think we really have to question it a bit more. And again, what I find interesting is that this is popping up more and more but you have no more discussion about that. The last point I want to make and then I will close is about this collectivism. And that's again, coming back to this idea, well, the majority of member states is small. But I think there's a real danger that we all sit around the table and say, well, collectively, or we're all small, the world is dangerous, the world is very complex. And maybe there's nothing that we can do. And I found it quite interesting, Federica Mogherini did a tour through different universities at the end of her term and was talking about her experience. And one of the students asked this, so is this something that you regret in your leadership as the high representative where you thought that you actually didn't deliver? And she said, well, yeah, actually, I'm still ashamed that you didn't manage the Syrian refugee crisis. And it was interesting, but she was just saying, you know, Europe is a prosperous place. The EU has money, the EU is organized, the EU has institutions. The EU also sometimes has political wealth with all the member states. But she said as a collective, we didn't manage to take the responsibility or feel responsible to deal with five million refugees, a region of 500 million people. And I found that very strong. I was really surprised by that because I think it shows us this idea that while you might have each member state being willing to do, and maybe also doing things, but the big challenge for you from policy cooperation, I think, is to say, well, you know, how do we make the whole world? And I was really thinking, how could you visualize that? And I think for me, the easiest is to see the use of bubble, big bubble, and then you have to see small bubbles in there. And these bubbles, you know, all move a bit, some are smaller, some are bigger, some move a bit more than others, some move a bit quicker than others. The thing is, if you don't connect the small bubbles, the big one around it will never move in any direction. And I really think this is one of the problems that we have to think about in terms of structure, not maybe just in terms of objective, but in terms of structure, what form policy cooperation means in the European Union. How do you make, how do you connect the small parts now that actually all have the willingness in different directions to have an impact on the big? And I really think this is also something in discourse that I'm always surprised or frustrated when political leaders talk about their EU. Something is happening, you know, we are too small, we don't do anything that you should do something. Well, maybe we should then stand up and say, well, wait a moment, aren't we the EU? I think this is really something that we have to get into our discourse much more. The member states are the European Union. The EU is us, we might be small, but the EU is big. And this is really something I think we have to consider a bit more. And also question, do the structures that we have, does form policy cooperation? CFSB and CSB is debated, do way this setup actually work for us? Does it help us to connect the small bits in a way that has an impact on the big one? I don't think that integration is necessarily the only way forward, but I'm also surprised that there's no more creative thinking saying, well, are we actually happy with the way the system works. I will stop here and I'm looking forward to our discussion. Thank you very much. Well, first of all, I want to thank Heidi for a very thought provoking presentation. I'm just going to mention a few points I picked out, but we will come back to a little bit, perhaps come back to a little bit later on in the Q&A. First of all, size is not a defining characteristic. There are cross-cutting elements of geography, policy, and that as well. So that's, I think, the first one. Second point, which did strike me very much when I was a practitioner, is the mismatch between institutional development and policy coherence. Procedure often becoming a substitute for substance. And I think that ties into the Syria point that you were making later on, that there wasn't actually the policy coherence, it wasn't a lack of capacity. The third thing, foreign policy is losing ground. I wonder is that not because foreign policy is no longer really foreign, and because the range of cooperation has begun beyond the political security of diplomatic and defense over the last 70 years. It's now reached into almost all areas of economic and social life, especially though not exclusively through the European Union. And this is possibly reflected, one of the reasons why you can't remember foreign ministers or people can't remember foreign ministers, is that we become more, international interaction has moved more to the level of head of state or government. And the fact that the European Council no longer includes foreign ministers ex-officio, I think is possibly a kind of an indicator of that. And then on the sovereignty argument, I remember to take the point, like we have always regarded, I think in our regard as sovereignty, as something that we use constructively in order to enable us to cooperate, we try to find collective solutions that take on board some of our concerns and amplify those to a certain extent, but not using it as a kind of a blocking mechanism. So I think I'll just leave those thoughts for the moment. And then I might move on to our next contributor, who is Daniel Fiot, a security and defense editor at the EU Institute for Security Studies, where he analyzes European defense policy, the CSDP, defense capability and industrial issues as well as hybrid threats. And I should say on this, that if you're looking for a sharper to guide you through terms such as Augustine's law, the Valley of Death in the areas of defense, expenditure, research and development, I think he's very much your man. Daniel is a visiting professor at the Free University of Brussels and at the Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent. And I asked Daniel to say a few words to us now. Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying good morning to everyone and thank you to the organizers for welcoming me here and for making sure that we could all be here together. I have the daunting task of condensing security and defense into 10 minutes, which is not easy. But let me begin first, perhaps, by providing some context to the debate. I mean, even today's news coming out of Turkey and Syria should send a shudder down our spine. Not only on the threat of migratory flows again, but also because Turkey seems to play the NATO card by quoting for article four, consultations. But of course, Turkey isn't the beginning and end of Europe's problems. There is also the question of transatlantic relations as well and the prospect perhaps of having a second term of Donald Trump may be, again, an excuse for a shudder down the spine. Although I must say that he's been quite helpful in stimulating the need for more European security and defense, I think. Also, it's worth probably keeping in mind some of the language which is emerging out of the EU institutions. And here I take Heidi's point about sometimes procedure masking substance, but I think it's probably a bit deeper than that sometimes and that the gap between rhetoric and reality can also be pointed to. And if you look, for example, at the recent interviews by the new HRVP, Borrell, he's been urging Europeans to relearn the language of power. So that assumes, of course, that we already knew what that language was, right? And that we just have to relearn it. Commissioner Breton has spoken about the need for more technological sovereignty for the European Union. This is the idea that geopolitics is not just about operations, but it's also about how we protect key technology areas and how we secure key critical infrastructure for Europeans. And then, of course, we have the president herself, the president von der Leyen, who has also said that her commission would be a geopolitical commission, which is a development of sorts because under President Junker it was the political commission. Now we've just inserted three letters at the beginning. And of course, Brussels as a set of institutions is still trying to make sense of what the geo part actually means in all of this because I won't go into a sidetrack long historical dissection of that term, but it seems to imply something which is that the Europeans are increasingly entering a world of power politics and of course of giants. And of course, the two giants are the US and China. And if I may say without specifically focusing on security and defense or the mechanisms per se, the big challenge the Europeans have is how we can adapt our multilateral system globally with the emergence of power politics because for me, the two don't necessarily go together. In fact, I always understood multilateralism as an antidote to power politics. And the problem is deeper because actually the idea of power politics is also reemerging, I think as Heidi has alluded to in her intervention, even within Europe. So the reemergence of nationalism, of populist movements, insistence on sovereignty, I think is also very, very clear. Now we have come in the last three or four years I would say, quite far on security and defense in terms of the instruments that we have developed. We have developed permanent structure cooperation, PESCO. We are developing the European Defense Fund and there are a host of other initiatives which are supposed to improve European capability development to support the competitiveness of the European defense industry and also to make sure that we have an operational capability. So we have that credibility also as a continent that will also deploy force if needed. We have the global strategy as our guiding light, I think still. Heidi's correct. I mean, it is by my count a 45 page plus document which includes everything. And I mean, if you want to be very critical, nothing. But at least that's the document we have to try to guide us a bit in the world. We also have following on from the global strategy, specific strategies or council conclusions on the way forward for European defense. Now, what the council conclusions from the past few years have set is that the European Union is still principally a crisis management actor. We're also an actor that is heavily involved in the development of the capacity of partners. And you see that principally, I think, through the military training missions and the civilian CSDP missions that we deploy around the world. But thirdly, it introduced the third concept which I think is important to the discussion today as well. And that is the idea of the protection of Europe and Europeans. And I think one of the big things that the global strategy has been responsible for is focusing efforts on the needs of European citizens and European interests. It may sound like a dirty term, but that is essentially the focus here. Now, on the basis of that, the concept of protecting Europe is to take European security and defense a bit further than just crisis management. It is to also think about how we might protect Europeans in case NATO is not there. And of course, we know increasingly that the tensions in the transatlantic relationship force us to think about how much more responsibility for our own defense we want to take on. And also here, we need to keep in mind the specificities of some member states who are not in NATO. And so they can only really rely on the European Union for their protection. And here, the idea of protecting Europe feeds into the treaties, which clearly states under the mutual assistance clause and under the solidarity clause, that the member states have an obligation to one another for their security and defense in case of a territorial attack or manmade or natural attack on the territory. Heidi's point is quite valid, though, of course, that it's very well to say that, whether or not that's a reality when it comes to it is a different question. So we have come very, very far. I think that at the moment in Brussels, we have a bit of a wait-and-see moment because, firstly, it is fair to say that the institutions themselves and the new leaders need more time to get into their posts. It's still a bit too early, even though H.R.V.P. Borel and the rest of the leadership have had a baptism of fire this year with Iran and Libya immediately coming out of the New Year celebrations. So the working methods of these new leaders will be crucial moving forward. And also, I would say, we need to keep in mind that all of the tools that we have been talking about for the last two or three years, PESCO, or even in particular, the European Defense Fund, are still not a reality. And I stress this point. And they're not a reality because we have not agreed to the multi-annual financial framework, the money you need to inject into these initiatives. That is still a very contentious argument. You can probably see over the last few days in the reports that initiatives like military mobility have gone from about the 6.5 billion euro budget over seven years to zero euros, which is hardly good for credibility. And I would argue probably not so good in the eyes of our allies or partners in Washington. So the MFF, the resources, the money you need, is actually quite important. Otherwise, you can't make of these initiatives a reality. The second point I would say is that we're also this year entering into a new phase in security and defense, one that I think probably moves the discussion away strictly from industry and capabilities to more to the operational side of things. And I think this has become quite apparent to leaders and to the overactive PSC that Heidi has mentioned. Even I find it difficult to keep track of the meetings and the content. And I'm sure even the ambassadors themselves did. There is the idea this year that we should move towards at least under the German presidency as some kind of initiative called the strategic compass. And I put that term in quotation marks because it hasn't yet politically been agreed even the title. But the idea behind the strategic compass and there are many theories and ideas doing the rounds in Brussels at the moment. But essentially the core logic is that the global strategy, countless council conclusions that have followed on security and defense still do not give us any clarity on some core questions. One, what type of defense actor should the European Union be? Especially in the changing geopolitical climate. So are we happy just to remain with CSDP? Or do we want to do something more than this? Second question that emerges from the idea of a strategic compass is how far are the member states willing to develop together a kind of common strategic culture? Now that phrase, the strategic culture of course has been forwarded mainly by the French president, President Macron. But I think also in the last few days and weeks HRVP Borel has also gone on record as saying that we cannot have a common foreign policy if we don't have a common strategic vision. So what is it that the EU wants to achieve in the world as an international actor? And also more specifically, what does it want to achieve in security and defense terms? Now as a prelude to the development of the strategic compass, which by my information should last about two years. So you can see what happens here. The reflection process begins with the German presidency and ends with the French presidency. Quite an interesting tie up there. But it's seen as a two year process or so. But before this begins, we have at the moment underway a rather important discussion on threats. So what are the threats that the EU faces face? What are the threats that the member states think are important to them and their national interests? This is supposed to lead in this discussion. And I think the format hasn't even really been put in place yet or the framework hasn't been put in place yet. For that we wait a bit for the PSC and for the EAS to come together. But the idea is that eventually we will have a kind of threat analysis in which the Europeans can see clearly in front of them what are the key pressing threats that Europeans face. Now this will be a politically sensitive but I think necessary exercise. Of course you can see the problem here. The moment every member state volunteers their most pressing security challenge, there will be a kind of beauty contest between which is the most important or which is the most pressing. We call this in the jargon prioritization which is a very, very scary word. But I would argue and I've done this for the last few weeks that I think as Europeans we should probably give a bit more attention not so much to specific geographical areas but those threats that cross geographical areas. So we see for example Libyan Sahel bleeding into one another even though they are quite specific conflicts they take up a geographical space. We also see that the threat that we would normally identify in the east with Russia is not actually contained to the east anymore. Russia has interests in Libya, in Egypt, in the Middle East, in Syria. So I think the question would be more about linking somehow these perceptions not withstanding all of the sensitivities that the member states have. Let me end by going into maybe some of the points that Heidi raised on the politics or the political leadership side of things because I think that this is an extremely important part of the conversation. And here there are also a few ideas that are circling or you can hear them in the corridors in Brussels. And that is how do we ensure that if we have the capabilities as Europeans, and that is a big if by the way, we need those capabilities but we're not there yet, if we have them, do we have the political mechanisms in place to allow us to act quickly? And that of course is a challenging question because we know that all sorts of countries, big or small, have different constitutional arrangements particularly on the question of the use of force if it comes to it. So the idea that the European Union has to be more agile in foreign policy making is not a new one as Heidi has suggested but now I think there is more thought given to how we might overcome the impasse. And the impasse of course is the problem of unanimity. We know this, it's a deadlock. The fact that any state can veto a decision essentially hampers the idea of quick and rapid action. So it will probably be no surprise to learn that one of the ideas which the Commission has forwarded and indeed even some of the member states, the larger ones it must be said are playing with is the introduction perhaps of qualified majority voting in foreign policy decisions. Now this of course is extremely sensitive as an issue. The idea that you could have a group of member states essentially agreeing on a foreign policy idea even though other member states may disagree, even though the action would essentially be put under an EU flag, so representative of the union without the consent of all member states, I don't need to tell you how sensitive that is. Now of course it is again, it's no surprise to learn that if the larger member states are pushing for this need for more agile foreign policy making, the smaller member states are generally, and I say generally it's not a golden rule, but generally quite suspicious of this move because it may seem essentially like the larger players are trying to cut the smaller players out of the picture. Now what I normally say is that I think I agree very much with the idea that we need a new kind of foreign policy making decision making mechanism. But if QMV fails, this is the hypothetical exercise, if it fails what would we put in its place? How would we rearrange CFSP? Because there's no good having capabilities or the resources if you're not going to use them when you need them. So I would say, and I've said this in my blog piece, which Ben says will come out on Monday, that the smaller member states have a particular responsibility here in not just saying we don't want QMV, but to perhaps think a bit more constructively about what else they would propose in its stead. And I think that that needs a lot more thought. One of the other ideas to jump from QMV is again another decision making idea and that is to develop a kind of European security council, which is another idea which has been put on the table. Again, I understand very well the premise behind it. This is the idea that of course, we should be able to take decisions quickly, but then the immediate question arises, which is, well, who would be the permanent members of the security council? If indeed you model it on the UN system, where would the small states play their role here? Would it be rotational or not? Would they have a permanent seat? Of course, I would advocate for Malta to have a permanent seat on the security council, but then everyone would, every country would. So the security council is also an idea as well, which has become quite controversial. I think Heidi mentioned this, the Brexit question. If the security council is also somehow to include the United Kingdom, well, can you imagine a scenario where the UK would take a decision in some kind of security council format that would essentially bind the hands of the 27 EU member states? Just imagine that situation, wow. So I would say that our leaders have actually not been lazy. They have actually come up with some radical ideas, I would say, and of course, it addresses the core problem, which is we're not fast enough when it comes to decision making, but of course, collectively we need to take on much more of a reflection on how that would look like, because the worst case scenario is that you know you would have one or two leaders in Europe proposing a big idea, only for a group of smaller medium sized states to immediately close it down. Well, of course, as we're all aware, the world will not wait for us in Europe to get our act together. Crisis will still emerge, we will still be called on to take a response, so we need to think a bit more about how we match our capability and security and defense initiatives with our decision making mechanisms, and I think that that's an extremely important part of the puzzle here. So 2020, I think for security and defense will be an interesting year. We will move, I think, rightfully away from obsession with industry and capabilities and I mean, it pains me to say it because that's my business industry and capabilities, but having more focus on the operational dimension is absolutely critical here, because if we are not able to prove that we can launch operations and missions to essentially protect our interests in the world, then we have a credibility issue, and no one will take us seriously, I think, if we're not prepared to do this. So we have a lot of ideas on the table, it's a very busy time in Brussels, I would echo Heidi's point here that I hope by the end of two to three years we're not still talking about papers and talking about structures or procedure, but that we can actually legitimately show some kind of output from all of this. Small and medium states, I will not get into defining what that means, but small and medium states I think have a particular responsibility here, not just in the EDF, not just in PESCO, but also for the overall direction of the union. We really need to think a bit more radically about how we change our structures, I think, in the coming years. Thank you. Once again, Daniel, I appreciate very much the way that you have outlined current developments and also rehearsed some of the dilemmas which are well known to us, and which of course are not new. Just to pick up one or two points very quickly, the emphasis on power, and you rightly indicated that there's a tension almost of an antithetical nature between power on the one hand and the multilateral system on the other. This, you mentioned recent examples of the language emanation institutions. I can remember language of this nature emanating going back into the last millennium even in the early days of the CFSP talking about power projection, and I remember spending a lot of time trying to replace this with promotion of interest and values, because I think that power does, I know in a sense you have to have power in order to be credible, but there's also the question, to a certain extent, that power projection comes across as being somewhat aggressive in intent and that sort. So power certainly is a reality you have to deal with, but the question is, do we manage it, can we manage it without necessarily emulating the actors that are involved? You mentioned the EU as still very much crisis management, but maybe some science that might be evolving, and on the global strategy, you mentioned the point about protection of citizens, but it's still, to my mind, a little bit in the context of the crisis management, international security provider aspect, because there is a phrase in the global strategy which says that security in Europe depends on peace beyond our borders. So it's still about trying to shape the environment around Europe in a way that is good for the neighborhoods and the regions concerned, but has the collateral benefits also in terms of European security. And then on the decision-making side, and you've rehearsed very well the sensitivities involved, and the pros and cons of the European Security Council idea, and I must say, as I look at it, there seem to be far more cons than pros, but we have looked at trying to, and you've underlined the need from small member states to look at how we might respond to this, but we've been going around this for many, many years, like we've had, I can remember in the Dublin draft treaty, which became the Amsterdam Treaty in the mid-90s, we looked at qualified majority voting for certain things, super qualified majority voting, consensus minus one, constructive abstention, which did find its way sort of into the treaty. We have passerell clauses, but it's still given the way, the extent to which the national identity and the profile and the sense of itself of a country is so much reflected in foreign policy. It's a difficult thing to give that away, and even if a government reminded to think about it, they would have to get it passed in national parliaments. Like even the passerell clauses in Ireland, there is a constitutional provision, I think it's Article 2949, which indicates that the approval of both houses of our parliament would be required in order for Ireland to agree to the passerell clause. These are the things we might pick up a little bit.