 Dlai, roi ydych yn fylwg, mae'n i'n gwneud y bach neu'n dod oaf y bach, i'r fawr yn Gwyrtroi yma, da i'n ei ddechrau'n Chynwys Blyneddoedd. Ac ydych chi'n mynd wedi'ch gwybod i'r gwybodaeth i'w gwybod i'w euddo'r Rol yn Yrwyr. Ydych chi'n mynd i'ch gwybod i'u gwybod i'w gwybod i'u gweithredu hegemoniad. Felly, dweud o'ch arferwad i'r ysgolwch, cyhoeddu ffrodol yn ddau, oherwydd rytwm ei ddim yn ôl am ymddangos lawer o gyllid a path yw yn tynnu'r hyn. Felly, y gallan i'n cwestiynau gweithioheitho'r rhaglenon nhw, byddiol gael cael y gallwn dda, yn ymateb o'i chydig ddim yn hynny oherwydd yr yddyddol yn write i'r rhaglenon nhw, bobl yn rhaid o'r rharf, sgwrs oherwydd i siarad o'r rhaglenon nhw yn oeddu o'r rhaglenon nhw, Rwy'r hwn yn fawr i'r gwaith yn ysgolwch ar y cyfnod o'r cyfrifiad yng Nghymru. Ond mae'n rhaid i'r pethau hyn yn ymweld y cyfrifiad a'r cyfrifiad. Mae'r gwaith ar y Cyfrifiad o'r hwn yn ymweld a'r gwaith. Mae'n mynd i'n gweithio i'n maen nhw'n credu o'r tyn i'r tyn i'r cyfrifiad. I'm not going to specifically talk about the implications for Ireland, but I hope we can get into that because I'd love to hear from your perspectives what you think this all means for Ireland. I'm quite conscious, I will be talking about economic policy and security policy, and I'm quite conscious that in both of those areas, Ireland occupies a particular space. It's in the Eurozone, on the other hand, in terms of security policy, it's a neutral country, so I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that. I'm not going to say very much about the current immediate political crisis around the leadership of the CDU and who might succeed Merkel as Chancellor, or the future of the SPD, for that matter, the future of the Grand Coalition. I'm happy to get into that in the discussion afterwards, no doubt people have questions and comments on that. But I thought I'd just start by saying something a bit more about the structural situation of Germany in Europe. This has really been my argument over the last few years is that German power is structural rather than a function of Merkel's personality or the strength of the current government. I think it's much more structural than that. It's almost exactly a decade since the Euro crisis began at the beginning of 2010. It's incredible that it's a decade has passed since then. That really prompted this big debate about German power in Europe. Lots of people started describing Germany as a European hegemon. One variant of this was the idea that Germany is a reluctant hegemon. In other words, it's not actually a hegemon, but it has the potential to be a hegemon if it would just overcome this kind of mental block that it has around leading Europe. But this idea that Germany was an actual potential hegemon became something of a commonplace, really routinely described in newspapers, very good newspapers as being a European hegemon. My argument has been that's not right, that Germany is neither an actual hegemon nor has it the potential to be a hegemon. I think this is actually one of the lessons of European history that actually Germany can't be a hegemon. Although in 20th century history what it meant to be a hegemon was something very different from what that means now, but I think the lesson still holds that Germany is actually not simply not big enough and not powerful enough to be a European hegemon. One very simple illustration of that in the current context is if you look at the size of German GDP as a proportion of the GDP of the Eurozone as a whole. So in other words, forget Britain and the other EU member states, well Britain's not an EU member state anymore, but the EU member states that aren't members of the Eurozone, if you just take the Eurozone. Germany makes up 28% of Eurozone GDP, which is quite big, but it's not that big. It's not above 50%, and actually if you put France and Italy together, they make up a bigger proportion of Eurozone GDP than Germany, which I think illustrates that Germany just simply doesn't have the economic resources to be a European hegemon. I think that the events of the last 10 years have shown again and again that Germany can't be a European hegemon. It hasn't been able to resolve the whole series of crises that Europe has faced over the last 10 years. That I would argue is because it simply doesn't have the resources to do so. I think the Euro crisis and the refugee crisis are particularly good examples of this, that Germany was simply overwhelmed by these two crises in a way that a real hegemon wouldn't have been. My argument was that Germany is not a hegemon, it can't be a hegemon, it's actually a semi-hegemon. This was a term that was used historically about Germany in the period of the classical German question between 1871 and 1945. A German historian Ludwig de Hio originally used this term, help-hegemon was the original German, semi-hegemon. What that meant in terms of the classical German question was that Germany was too big for a balance of power after German unification in 1871, but not big enough to be a European hegemon. It was in this in-between position which created instability. Obviously now the context is very different. I've argued that although Germany is once again a semi-hegemon in Europe since unification, it's no longer in the geopolitical way, in other words in terms of military power, that it used to be. This is rather a geo-economic perversion of the German question. The German question has re-emerged, but in geo-economic rather than geo-political form. Germany is a kind of geo-economic semi-hegemon. That's the argument that I made in a book that was published in 2014. Basically I think that still roughly holds. It wasn't really affected, I think, by Brexit. There was lots of speculation about that at the time of Brexit that somehow this would affect the role of Germany in Europe and change the balance between different European countries. I don't think it really changed anything. The statistic that I just gave about Eurozone GDP illustrates that. Even without Britain, Germany is still not big enough and powerful enough to be a European hegemon. Brexit may have increased the perception of German domination, but that I think is a slightly different thing. That's basically the argument I've been making for the last few years. I do think that this semi-hegemonic position that Germany has may now be coming to an end. That's basically what the argument I want to make this afternoon. Really for a couple of different reasons. The first is really that I think the German economy is going through actually quite a big structural crisis. There's been a lot of sort of declineism about Germany in the last few months, particularly around these economic questions. Some of you may have seen Wolfgang Minschau's column in the Financial Times on Monday, which was called Merkel's successor must confront Germany's decline. This was really all about the way that Germany is now, particularly the car industry, is now vulnerable to what Minschau called a technology shock. In particular, it sort of failed to diversify into electric cars and is now having to play catch up. There's also, I think, a big structural question to come back to China, which I talked about here last time. There's, I think, a real challenge now for Germany. It's becoming incredibly dependent on China as an export market, again, particularly the car industry. That demand though is now slowing for some structural reasons which have to do with the way that China wants to do more indigenous innovation and move away from being kind of an import economy. And so the German car industry I think is now facing a really, really big challenge. I saw another article yesterday on Reuters which was comparing the German car industry to sort of Detroit in the 1970s. This slowing of demand has led to an increase in the use of Kurzarbeit, which is where the German government essentially subsidises German car companies to continue to pay workers without them having to actually work because demand is slower. So there's a real challenge to the German economic model, this kind of export dependent economy. Germany's always been an export dependent economy, but it's become much more export dependent over the last couple of decades. An exports account for roughly 50% of German GDP now, which is quite extraordinary for an economy the size of Germany's, which really ought to have a much bigger internal market, an internal source of demand. So that's part of the story I think is these challenges in the German economy, and lots have been written about that. I think the second reason though, and this is mainly what I want to focus on, is, as I say, to do with the way that the international environment around Germany is now changing. And in particular the role of the US in Europe. So I think that actually the more significant shock actually that happened in 2016 as far as Germany and its role in Europe is concerned. There's not so much Brexit as the election of Trump actually. I think it has much more profound implications for Germany than Brexit does actually. It also, by the way, has a slightly knock-on effect for Britain's relationship with the EU and the EU's relationship with Britain. I'll maybe come to that a bit later. So, as I kind of suggested earlier on, this position of semi hegemony that Germany has had wasn't exactly created by the euro crisis. I think it actually goes back to German unification in 1990. But this position of predominance that Germany developed that really became apparent, I think, with the beginning of the euro crisis in 2010, I think developed in a couple of different phases. The first was simply with the end of the Cold War and German unification itself, which increased the size of Germany and therefore its resources. But also because of the end of the Cold War meant that Germany, the unified Germany at this point, was no longer much more secure than it had been during the Cold War, where it was literally on the front lines of the Cold War and very, very vulnerable in security terms. It became much more secure after the end of the Cold War and therefore is a consequence of that also much less dependent particularly on the US but also on France and the UK, which had been sort of security guarantors, significant security guarantors for Germany. So that's the first moment, as it were, is unification itself. And then I think the second moment, which actually is an indirect consequence of reunification, is the creation of the euro, the single currency. And with that, the transformation of the German economy that took place in the 2000s. One of the consequences of which was to make the German economy much more export dependent than it had been before, as I mentioned. And I think this is the part that really only became clear after the euro crisis began, but actually the shift had been underway before that. So Germany emerges into this kind of predominant position, but I think what the election of Trump illustrated was the sort of weak foundations on which that was based. That Germany was essentially this position of semi-hegemony that Germany had developed was dependent on this particular configuration of liberal international order. And in particular the role that the US played as a provider of global public goods. Above all in terms of security, but also increasingly in the last few decades in economic terms. Not just guaranteeing the economic order, but also being a source of demand for Germany. Again for German cars in particular. So before Trump was elected, successive US administrations had accused Germany essentially of free riding in these two different ways, both in economic terms and in security terms. In security terms, because it didn't spend enough on defence, it wasn't meeting the 2% commitment that NATO countries have. But it was kind of an economic free riding as well, which was basically free riding on demand from the US and not creating enough internal demand. This particularly became an issue after the euro crisis began in 2010. In the early years of the euro crisis, as you may know, there were these rather fraught phone calls between President Obama at that time and Merkel where Obama was urging Germany to shift its economic policy. Now the reason I think the election of Trump and the uncertainty about the US security guarantee that he's created. There was some uncertainty even before Trump, but he's really increased that uncertainty about whether the US is committed to the security of Europe with his comments about NATO and so on. The reason I think that's so important for Germany and its role in Europe is that I think what it's done is it's changed the role that military power plays in relations between EU member states. Until now, and for the entire period of European integration, the US security guarantee was fairly clear, and that was in a way the basis for European integration to take place. I mean, the colon seal community happens after the creation of NATO. The entire history of European integration has taken place within this framework in which the US guaranteed European security. One of the consequences of that, this way that the United States sort of pacified Europe, was that military power was taken out of relations between European countries. The fact that France and Britain were nuclear powers and had significant conventional military resources wasn't really something that they could use in negotiations with Germany. It was to some extent during the Cold War, but as I say, after the end of the Cold War it certainly was no longer something that they could use as leverage. But I think that's now changed since the election of Trump, now that there's this uncertainty about the US security guarantee. Suddenly the fact that France, and in a slightly different way now that it's left the EU, the UK, are these secondary security guarantors for Europe. It's now a factor in relations with Germany in a completely different way than it was. It was quite interesting, almost immediately after the election of Trump in 2016, a debate started in Germany, albeit in quite small circles, about whether Germany needed to think again about a nuclear deterrent. Either a European nuclear deterrent or a German nuclear deterrent, quite extraordinary. Now it hasn't really gone anywhere, the debate has kind of kept coming back, but this is now a question in a way that it wasn't before. Some of you may have seen that Emmanuel Macron gave a speech in Paris a couple of weeks ago specifically about the French nuclear deterrents, where he invited other European countries to start a, what he called a strategic dialogue, about the role of the French nuclear deterrent, the force de frappe in collective security in Europe. Now what was sort of implicit in that, I think, was the idea that we would be prepared to think about some way of extending the French nuclear deterrents so that it could include others in Europe. But that's the beginning of a conversation and there would clearly be some kind of quid pro quo here. And so you can start to see, I think, the way that French military resources now are a kind of a form of leverage in relations with Germany in a way that they weren't before. Now this kind of brings me to a piece that Bob Cagan, the American foreign policy thinker, wrote in foreign affairs last year called the New German Question. And he talked about the way that the collapse, the potential collapse of liberal international order. I mean this is really all about Trump really, the way that Trump is threatening the liberal international order. And especially the US security guarantee to Europe could lead, he argued, to a return of German militarism essentially. So there's a funny way in which, although his essay was called the New German Question, he was actually talking about the old German Question. It's the geopolitical version of the German Question, which is all about military power, the 1871 to 1945 version of the German Question, rather than the geo-economic version of the German Question that I've been focusing on. Now I think Cagan's wrong about this because I think he underestimates the degree of cultural change that's been in Germany since 1945. Pacifism, if that is the right word, it's something slightly different from pacifism, but broadly the opposition to militarism is now I think so deeply entrenched in German culture. I don't see that changing even if tomorrow the US security guarantee were really to completely disappear. I don't actually see any possibility that Germany would somehow revert to its previous militaristic culture. And you see this also in the reactions to this emerging debate about nuclear deterrent. There's such opposition, and I just think politically this is unrealistic. I think there's actually another possibility, which is actually in a way quite optimistic, certainly compared to Cagan's rather dark vision of the direction that Europe's going in, the direction that Germany might go in if the liberal international order, including the US security guarantee, were to further be eroded. I think there's actually a way in which US withdrawal from Europe could help resolve the German Question in its current form and could actually be good for Europe as a whole. As I said, thanks to the US security guarantee, in the past Germany had no need for French or British, for that matter, military capabilities. And so therefore it had little incentive to make concessions to France on other issues. For example, and I think most importantly, the whole set of economic issues around the Eurozone. I think one way of telling the story of what's happened in the last 10 years in Europe has been that Germany has refused to make concessions and reach a compromise with France to make the Euro sustainable in a way that it would have done in the past. And that I think in turn is to do with the way that the balance between France and Germany has gone. And it basically went already after reunification in 1990 as it really became apparent after the Euro crisis began. But I think the structural shift really is after German unification in a somewhat analogous way to what happens in 1871, when the balance of power between France and Germany also is destroyed. And so if that's right, that a big part of the story of the Eurozone in particular in the last decade has been the imbalance between France and Germany, in the past the way that the European Union often functioned was that France and Germany reached some kind of compromise, kind of a grand bargain, that's how European integration kind of functioned. That's I think ceased to work because the balance between France and Germany has gone. There's also another factor which is that EU is much larger now and so I think a Franco-German agreement is no longer enough. But I think it is a kind of a precondition particularly around these questions around the Eurozone. And so I think there's a way in which this at least now creates the possibility that the balance might be restored between France and Germany, that France has a little bit more leverage over Germany than it did in the past, precisely because its military resources now are relevant and important to Germany in a way that they didn't used to be when it could just rely on the US. And so there's a way in which I think actually there could be a new grand bargain between France and Germany that could help in particular make the Eurozone sustainable, which would obviously be good for Ireland, and more broadly make the European Union function again in a way that it hasn't done for the last decade or so. Thank you very much. Thank you.