 The 11th edition of the World Policy Conference is going to take place at the end of October in Rabat, Morocco. This has been 11 years since we have launched the WPC, as we call it, and at the time we had the conviction that the flat world, the happy globalization, was in fact a myth, and on the contrary we thought that the world would become more and more complex and in some ways troublesome. Unfortunately, events have proven us to be right with the financial crisis in 2008 and the following years, with the so-called Arab Springs, with all its disasters spreading over the whole of the Middle East, and today with the tragedy in Syria, with tensions in Korea and the Korean Peninsula and East Asia more generally, and behind that a kind of new artificial Cold War, mini Cold War if you like, and against this background the rise of China, the competition between China and the United States, which is very likely to dominate the whole of the 21st century. And therefore our mission, which is to contribute to answering the question, how to maintain a reasonably open world, our mission we think is more and more relevant. And in order to contribute positively to that end, we have to accept differences. We have to talk in a positive spirit. We have to be tolerant with one another. And these are the conditions to be successful over the long run. And again we believe that the WPC, the World Policy Conference, is more relevant than ever, and we hope and we trust that it will continue to be useful in the coming years.