 Rhaid i, mae'r cwethaf yn eu bod yn hyn yn lawer o'r institutions, ac mae'r ein ddaeth yn gweithio i'r gweithio'n gwahion i ddod y dweud yma. Ac mae'r cwethaf yn ei bod yn eu bod yn ei geinio. Rhaid i, mae i'n ddweud bod nid o'r cyflwyniadau ac ar eich eu diolethaf yng nghad приход o'ch wahanol ac cynnydd y llfaenydd yn deall. Ac oeddwn i'n edrych yn dod os ychydig o'r felIP ac o'r ffordd o fyfydd. Roeddwn i'n edrych yn gallu ei ddiddorol o'r bwysig cyrraeth, boi'n gysylltiadau dros rydyn ni o'n gilydd y taeth, ac mae'n tnw'n bnetwch gydig o'r bolig o'ch cyfrwg arddangos ond rydyn ni wedi'u cyflwynt. Mae'r sgwpethau yw'r ddweud yw'n ysgwrdd yna lle fyddai'r ddau. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddweud eich ddweud, ond iddyn nhw'n gweithio'r ddweud. Yn y lawr o'r sgwrdd yna'r ffaisol yw Catherine Ashton, ond mae'r ddweud yna'n cyffinio'r bermau. Mae'r ddweud yn eich ddweud yn ymwylliant. I was myself involved in the EU as a foreign policy actor from about 30 years ago, I became the European correspondent more or less at the same time as Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in Britain. I lived through in that role and then in subsequent roles in which I still took an interest in what was going on in Europe, particularly when I was the head of the planning staff, and then when I was in the Cabinet Office and then when I was in Brussels. For me, the big things that I remember are the Venice Declaration, now 30-something years old, not yet implemented. The crisis in the 1990s in the Balkans, extremely well, actually a big European failure. I'll come back to that in a second. The second crisis, another big European failure on Iraq, and then I was myself involved in different ways and different times in the negotiations with Iran, as Mari mentioned. But it forms for me a substantial part of my past as one, those for me are some of the kind of the big moments. There's one which I missed because I came too late to the European Union that's worth mentioning and that's the Helsinki process. I don't know if anybody is as old as me and remembers it, but this was actually a remarkable moment in the history of European policy because if you read the story at the time, you'll find that the whole process was being rubbish by Henry Kissinger, who thought that detente should not be organised by large numbers of people talking to each other, but by personal conversations between him and someone in Moscow. Actually quite a lot of the time was trying to close the operation down and there was a remarkable degree of European unity in it and what happened at Helsinki, in particular a lot of the things that went into basket, three human contacts and that were actually only there because of a united European position. Which was really a remarkable beginning for European foreign policy and I'm not sure that much we've done after it has really been as successful as that, though there have been and I'll come to one or two of what I think have been some important successes. That was a little bit about the past. On the strengths, I think that first of all one ought to understand that the EU itself represents a kind of statement and that has its own impact that now 28, but at previous times, when my country and yours joined nine and then later on 10, 15, 16 countries who for about a thousand years one way or another have fought each other to work together in such close collaboration is something that is an unmistakable and important phenomenon on the world scene. And I mentioned the failure in the Balkans in the 1990s, but this was although it was a failure, although there were many things that we got wrong, actually even through this people continued to talk to each other, try and look for ways forward, intense and acrimonious debates went on, but they went on. Very different from what happened about 80 years before, first in 1913 and then in 1914, the second Balkan war and then the events that led up to World War One. If you want to know why World War One happened, well, it's very complicated, but there was actually there was a general system failure and that system has changed completely that even when the European Union was not doing well in the Balkans, even when there were lots of divisions and disagreements, nevertheless there was a much closer understanding between everybody else than there ever has been before. And that still seems to me to be an extremely important fact later on and I'll come to that, we actually have done, I think we have done quite well in the Balkans subsequently, but I'll come back to that in a second. So the existence of the EU itself matters. Second, the most powerful, if that for me is a kind of political miracle, the second political miracle that's come out of the European Union has come with the great enlargement to the east in following 1989. What happens normally after a revolution? Well, the answer is you get a civil war. You can see a whole series of countries in which this has taken place. If not an actual civil war you do not normally get an immediate establishment of a democratic regime. Normally what you get is some combination of Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin and Stalin or as I say some kind of civil conflict and you see that now in the Arab Spring countries in many of them at any rate. So that this did not happen in Central Europe after 1989 is historically highly unusual and the European framework which includes NATO as well as the European Union. The European framework was central to that and I think in some ways it may have misled some of the more enthusiastic neo-cons in Washington who began to think that all that you needed to do was not addicted to it. You can see that NATO over and then democracy would flourish. I think that it happened in Europe is a result not just of this thing but of very many things. There's a lot of history as well and actually this was one of the important results of Helsinki was that there was a recognized leadership of people opposed to the regimes. That perhaps is the most important result of Helsinki. But I think that the European framework or Euro-Atlantic framework played an enormously important part in it as well. We also see this and now I come to the kind of recovery story in the Balkans. After the failures of the Balkans in the 1990s or rather towards the end of the 1990s the European Union concluded that the only way to deal with the problem was to be ready to accept these countries as members when they met the required standards. That has made an enormous difference in the region which is now the work is not finished by a long way but in most countries is now doing much better than it was before. All of the successes are partial but there was one important success around about the year 2000 which is not much noticed by anybody. It actually coincided with the arrival of my boss Javier Solana in Macedonia where an extraordinarily small NATO force was deployed actually without the Americans because they didn't want to have anything to do with it. But we and others were afraid that there was going to be a war there too. A small NATO force was deployed rather to reassure than to do anything else. Then there was a negotiation conducted by Javier Solana with support from the NATO Secretary General George Robertson which ended up in the ORID agreement amending the constitution in Macedonia. So far touching wood that has maintained the peace in that country. More recently you will have seen that the negotiations which I was involved in the preliminary phase has been brought to, I wouldn't say a conclusion because those involved in diplomacy will know that there's never quite such a thing as a conclusion. But has been brought to past an important stage by Catherine Ashton and there's an agreement between Serbia and Kosovo reached after a remarkable process in which she had dinners with the Prime Minister of Serbia and the Prime Minister of Kosovo about ten times I think and allowed them to talk about there how they saw the world and eventually out of this produced an agreement which I hope very much will safeguard the future of the Serb community in north of Kosovo and will enable the two countries to live together in the future. This is still not over, nothing is as I said over. Actually there are elections coming up in the beginning of November as the first round of elections and last this week already there were more negotiations about the conditions under which Serb politicians might go and encourage voters there to participate in the election. So each of these things which sometimes gets a line in the newspaper has normally got behind it all kinds of issues which you never hear of and many more hours of discussion of things that you wouldn't believe. So there's always much, much more work than you see in what seems to be sometimes a simple and obvious result. But for me that also is really a remarkable success. That's connected to enlargement. There's no doubt about it. Serbia has made up its mind that it wants to be a member of the European Union. This is an extremely big prize for countries in the Balkans which are poor, which desperately need investment. It's an extremely big carrot for both Serbia and Kosovo. But it's also, and this comes to the third thing that I think of as a strength, it's also a demonstration of what can be done when the European Union as a whole operates together and with the different institutions as well. There's no doubt in this case that collaboration with Germany was very important. But also as far as I was concerned, collaboration with the Commission was very important. And in some, one particularly difficult issue is connected to the management of the border. And the Commission provided extremely important support in resolving the problems now. What's it called? Integrated border management I think is what it's called. I should say by the way that this in the Serbia-Kosovo documents is referred to as IBM because if you're Kosovo you describe it as integrated border management. If you're Serbian you describe it as integrated boundary management because you don't recognise this as being international border. And these kind of problems crop up everywhere. But if people want to solve them they can all be solved. And this was, for me this was not just an effort of the European institutions, it was also a collective effort of the European institutions and the member states. All the more remarkable because five of the member states don't recognise Kosovo. Fundamentally divided European Union on this subject and yet it has produced I think a very positive result. Personally I thought that I didn't, I never minded the fact that there were non recognisers provided they interpreted non recognition in a flexible way. In some ways it was almost useful because when you had people who were on the Serbian side of the issue combining with people who were on the Kosovo side of the issue collectively saying to the two sides you got to agree. That was a message which was very difficult to resist. So I think the third strength is that I think that when you can get that miraculous thing and everybody works together the EU is potentially enormously powerful. And I mentioned a couple of other examples of that which are recent. One is a slightly complicated one and I won't go into too much detail but I wouldn't say that the EU has succeeded in Somalia. I think anybody is a lot where we and everybody else is a long way from anything you can call success. We have succeeded with others in very sharply reducing the amount of piracy of the Somali coast. We have succeeded in reducing the number of pirates. The EU operation when I was way back in my past when I was working in the Foreign Office people sometimes said to me what's your ambition for the European Union. And I used to say perhaps not completely seriously well I think we ought to have a fleet in the Pacific. Well we haven't made it to have a fleet in the Pacific but we have a flotilla in the Indian Ocean. And what's even more remarkable for an organisation which is basically rather peaceful organisation and is not very warlike is that the task force in the Indian Ocean actually has got tougher rules of engagement than the NATO task force as one of those as well. And it has executed one attack on the shore. It didn't kill anybody but it destroyed a lot of quite expensive equipment and discouraged people very strongly in the idea that actually piracy was a profitable business. But more than that the other things that the European Union has been able to do is it doesn't just have ships. It has an effort to support the transitional federal government including training some of its military. It has a very substantial aid effort indeed and even it has arrangements with some of the literal states for trial and if necessary imprisonment of captured pirates. And all of those things you can do partly because of the fact that the EU has got relations with all these countries and aid budgets. Also because some of the member states have got very useful relationships as well which they can use in trying to set up these arrangements. So all of those things the EU's capacity to operate in a number of different fields. It's definitely not a military organisation. It's a political organisation which occasionally has the possibility of military activity. And for me that's the right way to do things to have a political lead and we now happily have a special representative in Somalia who's creating a political programme there. So I regard that as being another example of what I said. Together the EU can actually be a powerful body. The second example that I mentioned briefly because is the Middle East. Not an area in which we've had really much success. The Venice Declaration was important. It set a new course that was eventually been adopted by more or less the whole international community, the two state solution, the whole international community except Israel. But really rather little has happened in this area except of course that the building of settlements has continued. But I was very struck last year when the EU had what seemed to be a failure in that we looked extremely disunited at the United Nations on, someone else will remember the technicalities of it, on it was a kind of higher grade of recognition of the Palestinian authority at the UN. And there was a three way split in the EU, looked very unattractive. But if you look at the EU conclusions in December after that which even so provoked a rather angry reaction from Tel Aviv, if you look at the conclusions in December after that you find unanimity from the European Union on the question that if there is further building of settlements in, now I better not quote the zone because I may get it wrong. I think it's area C but don't consider that to have a question mark after it in the record that the EU would be ready to take very serious action. Well I won't go into the story of how that happened but you find that for those who know the Middle East this was an important step. What got the headlines was the division in New York but actually what was much more significant was the agreement in December. There is of course with 28 member states there is of course a wide variety of views. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I was talking a little bit earlier to three or four of you about the EU's policies on Burma over the long period. I don't think that our policies were bad. Actually what the policies represented was they represented compromise between those who wanted very fierce sanctions indeed and those who thought the right policy was engagement. What we did in the end this was following a number of things but in particular following the killing of peaceful demonstrating monks in the streets of Yangon in 2008. What we did in the end was we had sanctions which were not trade sanctions. Nothing like the sanctions which the United States employed which were extraordinarily tough. Somebody I know their son on a visit there from the USA made the mistake of using a credit card to buy a book from Amazon while they were located in Myanmar. Then when they got to Thailand they found every card they owned had been cancelled. That was US sanctions. EU sanctions were much softer than that and were really more symbolic than real. At the same time in recognition of the fact that this was an extremely poor country suffering from a number of grave humanitarian crisis we also had aid programs at the same time operated through NGOs rather than through the government. So you could either describe this policy as being a complete mess or you could describe it as being and that's how I would do it as being a constructive compromise between two approaches each of which had something to offer. The other way in which I find myself actually working in the European Union I find the variety of people and opinion is a kind of extraordinary opportunity. For example working on the Balkans at different stages the team included I'd been a member in particular well so very close friends with a colleague from Italy, colleague from Greece and the lady from Slovenia. Lady from Slovenia of course spoke the language very well. The colleagues from Greece and Italy these are people who live in a society which is much less ordered than Britain is. As a result it seems to me always they have a much more acutist understanding of power in a place like the Balkans than I and northern Europeans sometimes do. So I think the variety of the European Union is also a strength. I wanted finally to say on the side of strength I'm leaving too little time for the weaknesses so I have to run through those very quickly. Finally I wanted to say on the side of strength I think even from the days when Marie was involved in it and I was involved in it I think that the political and security committee has grown in strength. When I talked to some of the colleagues in the political and security committee recently about some of the difficult issues that they dealt with issues on which you wouldn't expect there to be a consensus like Kosovo, like the Middle East, like indeed military action in Somalia. A lot of them said well actually their instructions were increasingly not kind of things which arrived from Dublin they were a process of negotiation and the way in which opinion was going in the political and security committee was increasingly important. The political and security committee is I think a much more important act now than it was a few years ago and that potentially is a strength. Weakness is I'll go through those rather quickly. The weakness is a lot of the time have had to do with machinery. The OSCE, the CSE it was there, the Helsinki process was a process remarkably well suited to the European Union at that time because it had no machinery. It was just a bunch of people trying to agree with each other and they managed to on this case and it was a conference and it was all about words and they were extremely useful and had a very important effect. Words were fine and their Venice decoration also was words but turning that into action following it up systematically there was very little machinery for that. The presidency which was and is a wonderful institution and I have very fond memories of being in Dublin and in other parts of Ireland during Irish presidencies. The presidency had a lot of advantages but it's not a very good piece of machinery if you want to pursue policy relentlessly over the years which is what you need to do in a lot of foreign affairs. So in particular one of the real crises in the Balkans was even if the EU had had a policy in the 1990s which it didn't the wouldn't have been machinery to implement it. Well the machinery that we have now is far from perfect but it's a lot better than it was. The second thing that has to be said of course is I've said when the EU comes together it has real strengths but there are lots of occasions when I'm afraid it doesn't come together. For me Iraq was a really big failure and perhaps that's an example of a general class of failures which is that the EU is not very good at dealing with great powers, super powers. It's not very good with China. It's better with Russia now than it was and the commission has played a very good role in that. It's not very good always with the USA particularly it's very good at agreeing with the USA but when the real need to disagree with the USA as there was on Iraq I think an opportunity was missed. It seems to me sometimes that the kind of gravitational pull of the large superpower tends to pull the EU apart. It's not always but sometimes and I wish we could go back sometimes to 1973 when the EU stood up to Dr Kissinger with very positive effects. I think I'll just say two things. The EAS is an organisation with enormous potential with enormously good people in it with I think potential for a real collective effort particularly abroad in posts but there are some serious things that need thinking about. That's not a surprise after a couple of years. There was a paper by about 11 countries I think. I don't know if others have seen it which I thought some very sensible suggestions in it but there's more to be done. There's more to be done there particularly problem of personnel management is obviously very complicated and difficult. That and other things need some attention. I think the EAS needs to become a kind of organic reflection of the political and security committee and I think that the commission needs to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. So anyway I've done past strengths and weaknesses. I don't think I'll say very much about the future because whatever anybody says about the future is normally wrong. So let's leave that for the Q&A because I run out of time anyway. Thank you.