 Rwy'n cael ei ddweud, wrth gwrs. Mae'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio i'ch ei weld i'r IEA a'u gweithio i'r hynny o'r llyfr, y llyfr, yr alwau i'r llyfr, i'r ddweud o'r politicau yn y dyfodol eu Llyfr. Llewc van Mytlar yn ystod yn gweithio i'r unrhyw o'r ysgolwys yng Nghyrch. Mae'n gweithio i'r llyfr i'r llyfr i'r llyfr, .. ﷻ has always brought that sharp analytical lens as a political theorist and that sense of time and transformation. That trains historians are hardwired to grapple with. It's peppered with political theorists and political theory. Hannah Arrant, a political theorist of our time, but Macchiavelli, a wonderful political scientist sartori, ond rwy'r own Irish political scientist is one of the greats Peter Mayer. It is bubbling with insight and I recommend it to all of you. It's on sale I think afterwards out there. Hodgeson Figus are here and I particularly like in terms of a scholar reading this who's worked on Europe over a long time. There were four things that I really liked about the book. One is that the style of politics that you present, the backstage depoliticisation, the front stage parliamentarisation and the front stage summitry, that is very welcome because it debunks the debate which is so sterile now, the either or debate between the EU as intergovernmental and supranational. And scholars have just got to forget this. It just isn't helpful. I was also very struck by your emphasis on language and discourse. In other words that the struggle we all have, political actors, those who work on Europe, those who study Europe on what is the nature of the beast, how do we describe it? I'm always minded. Donald Pochalla's wonderful 1970 article on the EU and he says blind men elephants in European integration. In other words if you can't see and you touch different parts of this animal then you have a very different view of what it is. I think politicians still struggle to describe what it is they do in the EU but also what the EU is. I also like the fact that you always present the EU not just as the Brussels Beltway but the collective and the parts, the whole and the parts. In other words there is no EU without member states and that to be a member state of the EU is to be a transformed nation state. And then finally it's a great run through all of the crises that we've had in the EU over the last decade exactly. So for all of those reasons I commend it to you. I really enjoyed reading it. It reads that you just trip along the pages and as we know the EU can produce pretty turgent documents. So this I recommend to you. So Luke it's my great pleasure for all of us to have you here today and perhaps you would begin by giving us your core, the core argument why you had to write this book. Thank you Bridget for these warm welcoming words and to the IAEA to have me here for a second time in fact and it's a pleasure to be in Dublin. I'm really glad because you like the book for all the right reasons which is that it is also a book not only a set of views and what does this man think about such and such issue but that it's also let's say written and that has a sense of language to it. But for the sake of time let me try and set out basically the core argument of the book which there is. There's a lot of flourish but there's also a core argument which basically is that the European Union has undergone a transformation a metamorphosis in these 10 crisis years as an institution, set of institutions built to start and maintain and build a market to a club of states which is also able to deal with crisis with sudden twists of fate with unexpected events. Now in a way I tell that story in two ways. First it is as a kind of chronicle of the four big crises of the past 10 years and usually the euro crisis where Ireland was very affected as well but also the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the refugee crisis and what I call the Atlantic crisis where I lumped together Brexit and Trump in the EU reaction to them. And of course they have been followed and treated by different crowds and they say so both in terms of news and in terms of academia I mean in the euro crisis you have the financial geeks and getting excited about spreads and in the Ukraine crisis you have your geopolitical experts and so on. But it struck me that in all of them the European Union as a rules-based order was confronted with some of its own limits and it had to deal with certain taboos it had to think about defining a border like in the issue with Russia. And the overall transformation I see and describe is that of a system doing what I call rules politics to a system also able to do event politics. Being able to react to certain changes of fortune. And the time issue here comes in in the sense that building a market making a rule on hygiene or distributing the fish quota among member states is something which requires hard work clearly but which you can do among experts, you can take time between the commission, a green book, a white book and the day something gets finally into the journal officielle or the official journal of the EU. It can be like five, six, seven years while you and your people, students and researchers in Florence know more about this than I do. So that's all great work wonders for a market. But it does not work or it does not equip you to deal with certain circumstances. So in the period I worked there the first big event capital EU which came up was when Greece almost went bankrupt in early 2010 and at some point in May 2010 there was like 48 hours to find 750 billion euros in order to make sure the euro would not collapse. So here you would not have the commission to a white paper on whether or not a state should be or should not be allowed to go bankrupt. No, this was just manoeuvring and excitement and an extra summit and Wolfgang Scheudel being flown into Brussels only to full ill being run off into a hospital and then the Germans had to fetch another minister placing him somewhere down in Saxony while he was on a Sunday afternoon walk with his wife and well, I could go into the details but this is different type of politics not your patient, cautious expert rulemaking but dealing collectively with very controversial issues as well. In the euro crisis it was about a lot of money about which idea of solidarity we defend and the crisis with Russia it was about war and peace to some extent on the continent and the refugee crisis, I know you've been sheltered here on this green island but it was of course a very divisive within EU member states and between them in what do we do if suddenly more than a million people come and walk over the Balkans into Europe? What do we do with Schengen? What do we do with our asylum rules? I wouldn't say what do we do with Dublin but that's what people in Brussels say in those cases. That brings two important changes. One is to some extent a change of caste, a change of protagonists. There's a lot of theatrical metaphors in the book including the title itself which is Alarms and Excursions and let me place a footnote here I needed the footnote myself as well. When the publisher came up with the title that's in Elizabeth in a stage direction for the moment where actors have to be prepared on imminent turmoil and clamour and action is a moment of uncertainty in the 16th century theatre. Change of caste is the first big change and a sense of gravity in terms of political initiative going from the European Commission has the master of rules politics to the European Council of EU summits with the gathered leadership and head of state or government collectively being able to summon the political authority to take these very substantive controversial decisions. It's not that they are more experts on things not at all quite to the country and the smartest among them know it but it is that they have a stronger political authority that they are better able to bind or to convince not always but their public opinion is back home which when it's about billions of euro or about taking in refugees that's kind of is needed. So there's change of caste but there's also clearly and perhaps that is an underestimated part of this metamorphose a different new experience of the public of European electorates of public opinions across Europe about what it really means to be in the EU I mean of course among political science that have been debates for decades on permissive consensus and all these concepts that basically saying well people are relatively indifferent to the EU they may whine a bit they may ridicule a bit talk about cucumbers and bananas but basically as long as things are roughly okay there will be no revolt about the EU it was not supposed to be as the technical word is not supposed to be salient and hence national elections were not supposed to be about EU issues well that has completely changed and in the time I was there working for President Varunpa, the summit chair between 2010 and 2014 there were 10 Prime Minister presidents voted out of office because of decisions they made or not during the euro crisis the public in a general sense the political public has discovered that what is decided in Ireland in Greece, in Germany in parliaments by governments or by economic decision makers has a mutual impact voters have clearly said and I'm not even going to talk about Brexit that they want a say and that they also want let me finish on that they want the politics to be out there they no longer buy the message what is decided in Brussels by experts let's say on hygiene rules or on fish quota it's just a good technical solution to a problem no, they feel that this approach of what I call depoliticisation is not credible let's say when it's about refugees it's not a scientific committee which can decide how many refugees you're supposed to take in it's not with asylum quota like if there were fish quota that you're going to resolve that that requires political debate and leaders convincing their own voters that there is joint interest to defend or make other cases but at least it is a space for politics that are open and therefore it requires no longer only backstage operations to come back to that term rigid but also front stage politics and even if that comes with the price of more noise including no doubt a more noisy European Parliament after the elections I think Europe can only win from that type of noise in evolving as a credible political sphere thank you thank you can I begin precisely where you've ended up with and that is the relationship between law and politics or technocracy and politics both run through the book and when I read you you relate the politics of rules very much to the market that comes shining through but don't rules also play a deeply constitutive role in the EU what do I mean by that that the EU isn't a nation state so it can't rely on the ties that bind either culture, history it relies on glue and the glue has to come from treaties and institutions and process and why is that? because all of the member states they kind of submit to be vulnerable they submit to each other and whenever anyone asks well why doesn't the EU have a fort 10 page constitution it's precisely because it's not a nation state so my question relates to how you see the relationship between that constitutive role of law and rules as policy making well I mean you give the answer or the start of an answer in your final line I would indeed distinguish the two levels the constitutional level of the the rules of being a democracy in the European space with the checks and balances from rules made by the policy making apparatus which of course form part of that glue and I fully realise that and there also what has brought our nations and our economies closely together has knitted them together so there is a kind of trade off there or you could also say a risk if you want to step out of the rules you take a risk but well in many of the cases I describe and basically the focus of the book is on crisis politics it's not on day to day business but take the Greek case again what did the rule say when Greece was about to go bankrupt the treaty even the short treaty said thou shalt do nothing thou shalt not act and then you remember this was a no bailout clause article 125 of the EU treaty so the rule said well just let them go bust but that would have been irresponsible so there is sense and I know it's tricky but there was a need to act in the moment and to circumvent the rule and then at least in that moment I talk a lot about improvisation also in this respect and of course later what happened was the rule was amended there was a scar which had to heal the EU treaty was an extra line added to it so the alternative to the rule may not necessarily be anarchy but it can also be powerlessness and in those cases I think you have to be very careful in what you choose perhaps just on the lighter note on the improvisation so on this I was inspired by Miles Davis on this whole jazzy theme and he once said to reach for his audience I will play it first and tell you what it is later and basically if you want to ask me one sentence what have you tried to do so basically we have looked at this for 10 years and let's now try and figure out what we have seen The cry says that you look at in the book Ukraine Refugee and the Atlantic Apollo Trump running through all of those geopolitical challenges and it for a long time the EU prided itself in being this normative power Europe if only the world out there was more like us it would be a great world and Putin, Crimea but also the refugees and now Trump has really been a geopolitical shock to Europe it has confronted Europe with its weaknesses, vulnerabilities and also that the world out there isn't becoming more like Europe if anything you look across the world and its large power politics again looking across those three crises has Europe in terms of the politics of events has it begun to get a handle on geopolitics or are we still very vulnerable? I think you're right to see them as part of one sequence one experience of waking up losing naive day losing innocence in geopolitical terms and in concrete terms I think we're still pretty fragile I will come to that but I find it nevertheless well heartening is maybe too big a work but to some extent good and useful and important to notice that there is this conceptual waking up first because really it means a complete shift of mindset and in Brussels it is perhaps even stronger than you can imagine here this idea of the founding fathers we are basically building a world of peace we're starting in Europe but it will be the avant-garde of humanity and the rest of the world will become like us and still see that and this is now only falling to pieces basically in recent weeks and months still see that in how we look at China how we have looked at China China becoming a market economy China becoming a middle class so it really needed a few rough moments to shake up these illusions that the rest of the world is not becoming like us and this sense has even reached Germany which of course among the bigger EU nations has been the one most reticent to deal with power issues and where I was struck by a quote by Zygmar Gabriel, the former leader of the SPD and briefly the former minister as well who said that in a world of caring affords we cannot be the only vegetarians and well it's important to first get that right and that's what these crises have done all in their own way with Russia it was pretty much a border issue a part of the EU politics refugees also to some extent and of course with Trump it is the European dependence on the US security which is put into stark relief now and concretely in terms of the frailty or the vulnerability of the EU a strong example and to some extent humiliating example is the way how the Americans have treated us as Europeans on the Iran deal many of you will remember a deal to make sure that the Iranians would not develop nuclear weapons which was in our strategic and economic interests which Trump has ripped apart against withdrawing the American signature against the wish of the three European nations plus the EU plus Russia and China with the power of the territorial power of the dollar basically to put it simply and we were pretty naked and the EU has tried to and including London by the way working with Berlin, Russia and Paris to uphold the deal building well now we're getting too technical but a special purpose vehicle kind of truck mechanism allowing to it's very important but it's fragile but it's like a seed that's how I like the seed which is planted which may grow into something bigger like the EASM well it was a pretty big seed but it was also started as a kind of improvised thing, the EFSF I'm afraid here you will remember the acronym and which has over time grown into something bigger and more important and this Iranian thing might also become more important but it's of course not enough but the awareness is growing among leaders and I also think among public opinions One last question before we go to the audience your last chapter is about opposition politics and how there can be opposition in the EU system and I just wonder is the problem how you organise opposition or is it a much deeper structure problem about how politics, democratic politics is organised in Europe in other words that the EU because it's a compound political system with the national and the European the states and the people that it is extremely difficult in a system like that to allow for opposition that doesn't take the house down and when we look at European integration is a political project so the surprise is not that there is opposition to it but that it took so long to emerge one would have expected given how significant it was that there would be opposition long before it emerged and I think that goes back to Salines but now that there is opposition how can opposition be structured in a way that it isn't Euroscepticism because a lot of what passes for Euroscepticism in my view is simply Europhobia so whenever you hear a senior politician describe the EU as a kin to the Soviet Union forget it, just don't bother listening to them they're not actually looking at the political system as it is so how can there be dissent which is necessary in politics but without it in a sense for example in the United States today there's really deep roiling politics but no one questions the future of the United States but in Europe we worry that the next European elections can take the house down I don't believe they will I think that's an exaggeration but I do think there's a structural problem of politics in the EU well yeah, I agree and what I do in this final chapter in a way is the Peter Mer chapter because I draw inspiration from well with Peter Mer and others how Peter Mer analysed the issue of opposition and basically he wrote in a piece more than 10 years ago that if the EU would not allow for opposition within the system the opposition would organise against the system or in other terms if you do not have classical opposition in the system like you have opposition and government and you go to the ballot box and you can vote out your government you get new policies or at least new political personnel if you don't have that you risk harvesting opposition of principle or as you say opposition who wants to take the house down or to get out which exit of course is also a form of principle of opposition I think it has very much to do indeed with the structure of the EU but also with its DNA of depoliticising everything that was the magic trick take the politics out of any conflict be it from the very start France and Germany haggling about cool price and then EU or European civil servants say well stop, stop that we're going to come up with a solution agreed by the experts and we're going to or we will find a compromise but basically any conflict was transformed into a technical problem which you could solve also by legal means and it's a great trick but it does not work for the issues that we have been talking about and the issues which have defined these crises peace, war, border, solidarity culture, identity but it is a very strong element to depoliticisation of almost everything the EU does the consensus culture including in the European Parliament strangely enough has, from the 1950s even always had a centrist consensus not only a federalist consensus but always has solved like what you today call grand coalitions of the socialist and the Christian democrats so over time indeed the effect has been that critical voices have been muted, disqualified cast as anti-Europeans because if you did not agree with a rule or a proposal you were supposed to have not understood it because it was clearly a reasonable proposal hence you were stupid or alternative you were simply not a good European kind of moral argument which was not played out or is not being played out explicitly so much anymore but you can still sometimes feel it and I will say I have a personal allergy against that kind of argument and so it's so important to find a stage where you can have a different kind of political confrontation the European Parliament I think perhaps to conclude on that after the next elections of May it will be a more noisy parliament will probably be a swing to the right as well it will probably put an end to the grand coalition in the sense that you will need three, four parties to get a majority well I think there are also advantages to that you will have less back room deals between the socialist and the Christian democrats greens, liberals, all the conservatives may also throw in there a lot and I find these predictions including by lofty intellectuals Bernard Levy and writing letters George Soros predicting the end of European civilization if we don't really know that it's all out there, exaggerated and not helpful but of course the question is whether these parties let's say Urban and Salvini and however they will organise themselves whether they will play the role of an opposition a classical opposition striving to get all the policies or whether they will undermine the system from within as a principled opposition and there we have to be very careful also in view of the rule of law but I'm open to that happening and I think one should embrace that kind of noise which will make the European Parliament a more credible place because its weakness is not it's lack of formal competences it has more than many national parliament its weakness is its distance to the voters effect that people feel it does not represent them and if it represents the plurality of voices within your electorates more credibly you will paradoxically in fact get a stronger European Parliament I mean one of the surprises is that with the rise of Eurosceptics in numbers of Eurosceptics in the Parliament since particularly 2014 but in essence they really weren't interested in doing politics in the Parliament they didn't work the committees they didn't do any work they didn't want to collect the money to fight domestic battles Le Pen, le Farage or the classical examples so now open to the floor please and if you wouldn't mind telling our speaker who you are please and just a brief comment on that question you spoke of the union's strategic capability to deal with Russia I think the union is facing a real loss and just to mention that we shouldn't underestimate the significance of using Dr Merkel of the next couple of years in terms of her lived experience of the current fluent Russian dozens and dozens of one-on-one meetings with Putin as well as structured summits that's a really significant strategic loss which I think the union perhaps may have planned for just a brief question though on the presidency of the European Council given that President Tusk is coming in his final months and your own marine side seat that I've been on for over those five years I'd love you to share with us how you would profile the skills, the qualities, the vision of the person needed now to take on that role and would you like to give us your sense of whether that profile fits for example Putin, Merkel or indeed some other candidate you might like to suggest? Well, I will not go that far in sketching profiles but I think both Van Rompuy and Tusk had their big crisis for Van Rompuy it was the Euro crisis which has defined his presidency and which also got the best out of his experience and talents in the sense that he was trained as an economist and a philosopher he used to quip that the second quality was more important during the crisis than the first to keep calm and to have a right perspective on things but also let's say trained as a negotiator in Belgian politics holding together at the end of his term of Prime Minister five party coalition and in the EU you have 27, 28 party coalition to some extent and so he was extremely important there a right man at the right time the Tusk presidency our Brexit has been more defined by the refugee crisis which it's difficult to look at it this way now that we're in the existential phase of Brexit but has been more important for the EU in terms of shattering and in terms of immediate danger at least again than Brexit at least so far and there he has less been negotiated with he has picked the fight with Merkel shifted on behalf of most members of the council I should say in this dramatic summer of autumn of 2015 winter 2016 and feeling that the balance had to be restored in terms of our imperative of charity of opening up to refugees and also our duty as his duty or their duty as political leaders to protect the borders and he has in the Atlantic crisis he has been more vocal both on Brexit and on Trump than Faron Pai would have been but I think it was important he has become President Tusk that is a voice in his own right a recognizable voice on the European stage so there you see two rules I think you have to be somewhere in between or combine both the confidence man because I mean imagine you're President of the European Council you unlike the President of the Commission who has a massive apparatus a big budget who can initiate legislation you have nothing you have a few treaty lines but you have no real power you cannot even nominate power nothing so you first and foremost you rely on the trust of your peers around that table of 28 leaders and nobody else in the room and I think they both have that and won the trust of their peers and it's also true you mentioned two names that are floated Prime Minister Rutte from the Netherlands Merkel well they have been there for 8, 9 years Merkel even since 2005 so they have the starting point which is the confidence of their peers and reaching out to the wider public comes only second if you do that without having without being able to speak on behalf of the council you will not get very far again it's a bit different for the Commission and to conclude on an Irish note I was very happy to have when I left the Forum for Cabinet I still worked for three months I was happy to help and recruit an Irish successor some of you may know me he's even worked here who has in a way helped Tusk to also find that outspoken voice and I think it has done you well including in the Brexit work where Tusk has been very supportive of Ireland and has indeed known It was a great pleasure to read your earlier book Passage to Europe and the pleasure has continued with the dialogue between England and Ireland I'd just like to come back to your point about Europe as an at-home car I've always found very appealing the description of the European Union as a union of states and peoples that sort of rather than going federal or whatever and also often thought that just as the sovereign state which is the kind of paradigm for world order at the moment could be traced back to Europe in the 16th, 17th centuries so maybe, just maybe after all the turmoil in Europe we had evolved a new paradigm or was beginning to emerge the birth of a new idea these Europe states and peoples with values and knowledge and so on and to some extent I suppose you would say that it was easier for that to come into existence because the carnivore aspect was more or less what would you say, delegated out to NATO in Europe and we can kind of speak so much about that because we're not in NATO and we want to be but nevertheless that aspect was sort of hide off to an extent so I'm just wondering if that concept first to the union of states and peoples and more importantly of the combated base knowledge of idea to possibly be new in some sort of sign of a possible future where a war of order might develop is completely gay I'm not misty, I doubt it but I just wonder if it's just a matter of rhetoric or if there is still some hope for keeping it alive and developing it Well that's a very pertinent question, thank you but I think there are two in fact one is union of states and peoples that's more a kind of constitutional or institutional question on what the EU could look like and to what extent it can develop into a full blown federal state along the line of the United States well there let me be brief I have more in the book but I do not think that will happen for historic and political reasons European states will continue to work more closely together in the pressure of events because of the treaties they have concluded but it will not end up with Brussels being like Washington today the other issue the normative power of the European project will that go away? No, not completely but I think it can only survive if we take it for what it is and that is it is not the gospel for the whole world we will have to recognise that this is and we can call it values we can call it to some extent even interest in the sense of what we find important it is our way of life the things we hold dear to we want to protect them and we will have a hard job and we will have to fight for it to protect that world and our values within our European space I think the idea of of exporting those values to the rest of the world to China and Russia is that in a way because that's the kind of wars out there and perhaps situation might change you never know but there we are clearly closer to the 17th century Westphalian world you refer to in your question than at any point between 1950 and 1990 but I think it is important also to have that sense of identity or glue as you called it Bridget earlier on more than just rules and treaties that we can be and should be proud of some of these values and our ways of doing and also realising that that is what we share as European nations so that we should preserve and as soon I think as we get into the into well the exporting or you can find theological analogies mode it will backfire and it will not work Paul? Let's be from the institute I like your use of Peter Mayer and his central point was the lack of politics the lack of their capacity to handle the events that you described and that transition from rules to events is a very rich way of approaching the subject so congratulations what I want to really add building on other questions is whether you see that transition towards events management and the negotiating skills and the dealing with the geopolitics and the multi-polar world that feeds back even in a second order way back into political legitimacy because if the visibility of handling that the word is getting smaller and smaller first and the visibility of handling that actually in some ways re-establishes another layer of politics at European level so if you look at that constructively understanding the noise and not understanding the gloom and other interactions but actually and within the more modest normative ambition of the whole project in which you have to deal with China and you don't export the word and you don't proclaim yourself as the west in a world that is no longer western actually it's more constructive than maybe it looks I would agree obviously and and that type of politics your right to add brings its own legitimacy and you also mentioned word visibility which is key in my whole approach to politics and political thinking visibility is a very precondition of legitimacy political actions have to be visible so that people can relate to them that they are bodied to some extent that they that it's not only technical apparatus producing rules or decision but that there are real people out there who commit themselves to such and such decision and I think it is perhaps closer to a French view of politics you know French presidents like to see themselves as action man solving one crisis after the other and a bit less perhaps tuned to consensual parliamentary style politics but still you need both and the European Union will have to increase its capacity to harvest also that kind of legitimacy having to do with protection to to survive Oh not rather calmly you mentioned the whole question of what the let's say those who don't quite into the whole feminist European project might do when they become members of the European Parliament and what to suggest here I think Richard said that basically they use the money to do whatever they want to do upon that answer but why should they try to play politics in Europe at the parliamentary level given what happened with the European constitution which was rejected by two founding member states and then implemented in secret lacking the visibility that you've just called for by Angela Merkel when she became president of the council at the time and was presented against the advice of the man who shared the constitution and convention as a thing for lawyers to agree in other words went back to the thing you put your finger on don't worry about it when dealing with conflict but we do it in secret and I just want to raise another point about conflict that to me was an event where the European powers that we should have said it's a bridge too far we should rest now and the conflict that exists between those who want to bring in the European constitution whatever form it takes and those who don't we have to wait until people catch up and I suggest you that there's too much emphasis on surprising conflict because conflict can be used as a means of greater understanding and that may take time but it doesn't always lead to violence or chaos Well I fully agree with the gist of your argument that conflict can lay out positions clearly in the open which and then allow everybody to see also the power relations between the two positions I would just add on your first comment and coming back to what you said Marine Le Pen and Farage basically using the European Parliament for money I would add second thing they used it for which is visibility exactly, YouTube films YouTube excerpts so they used it as a stage as well to be able to communicate to their focus quite directly and they even used the European Parliament audio visual services for all of those and I think one sentence that the generation Salvini Orban they will want to do the politics as well they will want to be involved in the policy making and there will be a generation of shift there Now we have two finals so I'll take them together because I'm conscious of the time so please We just got back with the institute just two things one is to be partied already in the nature of the sort of national versus EU institutional relationship How do you evaluate the tendency which in the Irish experience is to say look Russell's won't do we are okay there are unreasonable over there and there is sort of a blame culture due to national policy or performance deficiencies that is that national parties and the national administrations tend to push on to Russell's to what you think of that particular on some of the dilemma that you like and secondly this was touched on already and your events based politics and rooms based politics I mean you couldn't argue that for I can say the European Union and maybe you would see for yourself what it is or probably so at the critical points that you had an easy to be constrained by treaties and politics duties were but you also have a certain elasticity that I would do what it takes whereas if you had appreciated quite the opposite and you know went back into a technocratic bunker so if you could elaborate on those two issues a little bit the blame culture on Russell's and secondly the importance of personality at critical times Thank you for taking the last question Max Miwgwer we said yes as some of the related question I was interested in your thoughts on the increasing accountability of member state executives because Brexit I suppose at least in part seems to be an extreme result of the member state executive leveraging the sheer complexity of the competency allocation in the European Union to point a finger at Brussels while at the same time not being able to not take responsibility for its own actions and it's wondering within the current treaty frame of DC that development increasing and the increased focus on the council DC an increasing trend in that direction of more accountability and is there a limit to it I think you need an answer and two sentences so that I understand the question is better Essentially do you think there can be full accountability considering the current complexity of competencies of member state executives for their actions within Brussels for how they make decisions for the part of the plane of decisions being made I'll start with that and then I'll come to your questions I think complexity should never be an excuse for any government ducking its responsibility complexity is what bureaucracies produce and love to produce a government should be able to make a situation readable, scrutable and to say this is important, this is our priority so I do not think there is a contradiction there perhaps this brings me also to your Williams question on the plane perhaps governments have used or abused sometimes the Brussels complexity to duck that responsibility but they should be punished for it and I would add to your first question that some leaders have learned from David Cameron's unhappy experience in spending ten years blaming Brussels for everything and them thinking he could win an important existential referendum in two jolly months of campaigning if I think of the Dutch Prime Minister he has shifted gear, changed his language to hours literally after the 23 of June 2016 and has realised that if he ever were to come in that position he needs a track record of a more positive, more credible and more engaged in any case European discourse the tendency will remain but the electorate will also punish those blame games including because the public space is all open everybody is reading everybody's papers and so on I will finish on Draghi because I like that question and in a way what Draghi did that perfectly illustrates how even the European Central Bank pure technocratic body balances there on a court between the rules politics and the events politics you quoted that middle part of its sentence I'll do what it takes in to these London bankers to save the euro and then there were two things at the end of the sentence he said with his Roman voice and believe me it will be enough so that was pure bluff that was saying okay if you bet against me my basement is deeper than yours and you will lose your money so bluff typically is something from the toolkit of the event politician not of the civil servants Sarkozy is a great bluffer as well and Trichet was Draghi was playing from that but his famous sentence starts with three sometimes forgotten words within our mandate comma we will do whatever it takes and believe me so you've got the whole stretch from okay we have a mandate we're doing rules politics and we will act so I think it's one of the most brilliant phrases in the whole crisis and he rightly deserves his nickname Super Maria only for that I think you can historians will look at every single document or speech made by the by all of the central bankers and you will not find one that there isn't covered on the legal and on the mandate everything was covered by one sentence it wasn't always this one but it was the proper functioning of monetary transition they always had cover they never once were going to be accused as central bankers that they had acted for various they were at the edge all the time well I think we have to bring this wonderful conversation to an end thank you very much for giving us of your time it's a terrific book and terrific in so many different ways because the world of politics is today at a time of shift and shock and transition it matters not just in terms of how we look at the world but it actually matters to what will happen our world and that's why this is an important book but also a great read thank you very much