 I'd like to give you a kind of a contrast view as a way of introduction, a contrast view of Germany and Europe at a time when I decided to work more on Europe and today. Now, it so happened that 30 years ago in the mid-80s, I decided to move away from academia into the think tank world. And the transition was somewhat smooth because I first started to do policy work at a university and then kind of build a public policy think tank at a university. But I thought that'd be more interesting than the academic debates, which were rather specialist and rather peculiarist and rather about pushing people into niches than letting them to see the bigger picture. And I was always interested in the bigger picture. And it so happened that at the time of the mid-80s, Europe was getting back on the move again. It's not that it has been on the move all the time. Actually in 85, it was just ending about a decade or if not more of a relative stagnation. It was the community of 12 member states. Germany was the strongest economy in this. Germany was a junior partner to the politically strongest member state at the time, France. There were interesting dynamics between Germany and France. Think of the 1984 visit of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl to Verde. It was the first time that a French president visited a mass graveyard where also German soldiers were buried. And there was this handshake or this taken, it wasn't a handshake. They took each other's hand in the commemoration ceremony, which also shows that at that time the past, Germany's past in particular, was very much present. And there was still a need to go back to some of the places and situations which were connected with Germany's past. Both at World War II and at World War I past in order to demonstrate that this was a different country. It was a different Germany and there was a different type of relationship between Germany and its neighbors. Ten years later, ten years after this 1984 handshake, there was another one of those gestures. The Eurocore, the German participants of the Eurocore being invited to parade on 14th of July down the Champs Elysees. And one of the most vocal statements on French television and in French media was Jules Gardistan complaining about the situation, saying that as a young boy, the apartment of his parents was on Champs Elysees. And he could see daily parading German troops down Champs Elysees and he was disturbed by the fact that they were parading down Champs Elysees again. And Mitterrand's idea was to demonstrate to the French with this invitation that he believed that this was a different country. So on this non-economic, non-institutional level, on the level of social psychology, political emotions, you know, kind of the software of European integration, there was still a lot of work to be done in that situation of 30 years back. But there also was 30 years back, there was an architect, architect's coalition of the founding members who very much saw themselves as the principal stakeholders of this integration process and the principal advocates of carrying forward integration. And this six plus six, you know, six founders and six newer members, gave them adequate room to actually not dominate but shape the policy debate inside the European Union. There was, from a German perspective, a like-minded accession to the North with Denmark, the United Kingdom and Ireland having joined countries where there was a number of shared preferences, particularly with the Danes and the Brits, the Irish, people didn't know really what they were about. They kind of, in the German view, came on the back of UK membership. There was a manageable transformation challenge to the South with Greece joining in 81, and on January of 1986 Spain and Portugal joining. So that all looked as if it was designed for a country like Germany being divided and being still a front state in a otherwise moderated East-West conflict to unfold and to act and to shape its environment. The political agenda of German-European policy at the time was integration must succeed. It should not be allowed over the longer term to stagnate or to regress. Because it was the anchor, not just an anchor, it was the anchor of Germany's role in Europe, of Germany's international role in a wider sense. Political integration should advance. And also economic integration in the German thinking of the time was basically about political integration. Economics was an instrument to drive the building of a political union, rather than being pursued on its more narrow merits alone. The EU's competitiveness at the time was an issue of concern of German policymaking, because Germany saw that there was a trend that it would kind of separate itself too much in terms of competitiveness from a number of its other partners. So there was reason to help shape up the EU at large in order to keep a certain level of complementarity inside the EU. And Germany was prepared to do what it takes to quote from Mario Draghi to make that possible. And one of the means, German EU policy at the time employed, was actually to be ready to fund change in the European Union. That was when this was necessary. Think of the famous, I think to Europeanists, maybe to the outside world, it is just a footnote in the history books. But to the Europeanists it was a rather significant date in February 1988. It was a big controversy among member states about the single market. Number of countries Germany included, very much wanted it. UK very much wanted it. But other member states thought that this would be too harsh. And actually they needed compensation if they were supposed to open their markets in the way that DeLore's white paper had proposed. So the doubling of structural funds was their principal issue. There was no agreement. Britain was drawing red lines, which is a particularity of British politics. So it was then up to the Germans to say, OK, at the end of the day it's 3 billion Deutsche Mark. That's missing in the budget in order to have a deal. We will pay in that 3 billion. Four years earlier Margaret Thatcher had negotiated her rebate. And she was not prepared to say, OK, I give up 30% of the rebate in order to get it done. But at the time that was the German position. Everybody was expecting the Germans to chip in the extra contribution when that was needed in order to get something done. And Germany did, even though there was a kind of pay master debate at times at home. Because the political reasoning of the German political class was this was too important to fail over disagreement over 3 billion Deutsche Marks. So Germany's position to sum it up was a driver of integration embedded in a triple support structure that I've laid out. This Franco-German relationship, the Founders' Group, and this kind of Protestant enlargement. Not in the religious sense, but in the kind of the business ethic sense of that. An enlargement to the north that sort of enlarged the group sharing a number of the preferences on economics, but also on social policy on how to run a modern state as Germany did. Germany was perceived as a lead country in this European community because it was more integrationist than France. It was the most preferred partner of the smaller member states in this community because it was very understanding. On a bilateral perspective, Germany was able to compensate part of its junior status in relations to France because it had that relationship with the smaller states. And German governments paid great attention to talking to smaller member states a lot in order to be seen as the country that would then bring in their views and interests into this principle bargaining that was going on all the time with friends. Fast forward 30 years. Where are we today? And I say that now, as Catherine mentioned, in the luxury of an observer position after having engaged a lot also in consulting governments, the German government mostly, but also other governments on this rather fascinating period over since 89 with the many changes that we have seen. Now we're in the EU 28. Now we're in a much more fragmented environment, much less structured than even the EU 12 was at the time. We have Germany united under the Kohl paradigm, which was at the time before 1989, Kohl's innovation to this traditional conservative position on the German question was that the German question was not a question of unity, but it was a question of freedom. And when unification came about, it precisely came about as a consequence of understanding it as a question of freedom and not in principle terms as a question of unity. Germany again is the strongest economy, even though it elevated into that position in a different way than many people in Germany thought in the early 90s when they still thought that the biggest economy of the West and the biggest economy of the East would necessarily be a super economy. But then the Soviet Union collapsed and the biggest economy of the East all of a sudden with losing its markets and losing its monetary advantage collapsed rather thoroughly. It now is a senior partner to France, at least when it comes to EU matters. The past is still present, but in a very different way, not in the way of this immediate connex to Germany's past, not in the way that it guides government policy on an almost monthly basis as it used to 30 years back, but rather in the way of political caricatures of Merkel or Schäuble been portrayed in Nazi uniform or with the Hitler moustache or this debate about the repayment from wartime occupation or the Piketty argument that Germany is the one country in the world that never repaid its debt, which is not true. But it's interesting that it comes up in these contexts. Now this EU-28 exists on a much higher level of integration, but on a much lower level of diffuse support for integration and that largely affects also policy making in Germany today. The German public used to be pro-European, very pro-European in a diffuse way. People may have had second thoughts about the merits of certain steps in the integration process, but they thought that the principle idea that integration must not fail because it is the framework for Germany to live and prosper and share with its neighbors, that isn't valid anymore. It's not that the Germans have turned away from Europe, they are still. If you look at Eurobarometer findings, they are still pretty much up there, not in that high range of numbers, but in a good middle position, but they are much less willing to give Europe the benefit of the doubt. See, when we're not convinced, but when our leaders tell us, we have to do it, we'll do it. Now leaders such as Angela Merkel are very cautious, not to do anything that could irritate her public. That could raise the more distant or more self-centered feelings of the Germans to focus on Europe. She doesn't want to debate European debate at home because she senses that this debate would not necessarily expand her policy options but rather limit them further. But also the EU has changed. It's not just that Germany is in a much different position, but the EU environment is much different compared to 30 years ago. The architect coalition of the founders is gone and is not going to come back. There is no consensus group of these six countries today anymore. The like-minded accession idea also has sort of withered away because the Eurozone has two of the like-minded countries out, Denmark and the UK. It has brought about other countries in the entering of integration, but not necessarily on that level of consensus that has been characteristic for the founders coalition. Many member states take a more instrumental cost-benefit approach to integration, and so does Germany. Many in Germany are aware of the fact that EU enlargement has meant that we're now surrounded by friends. In all directions, and no other EU country has more direct neighbors than Germany has, we have members of the EU except for Switzerland, but that's kind of half connected to it anyway, so it doesn't really feel like non-EU in this sense. We have a big transformation challenge in the east from a Berlin view mostly done. It's not done really, but it has been rather successful. It has brought about a number of not fully consolidated but fairly stable in rising new member states, mostly somehow friendly to Germany, sometimes more, sometimes less. That's, for example, the Czech Republic at times, or Hungary at times, or Poland at times, but mostly pretty close to Germany, with Germany being the biggest economic partner of most of these new members, and it's an economic partnership under the roof of the European Union, which I think is a very effective means, and it's perceived as that, to control possible anti-German tendencies there. The transformation model south over the past 30 years has not thoroughly succeeded, and one of the pet trials of Germany's political integration plan, a politically motivated economic and monetary union, has not brought that about, but rather exposed the fact that it has not worked much more intensely than German policymakers have ever planned. In this Europe, Germany is clearly in a lead position, partly by default, because other traditional leaders are much weaker on a number of key policy issues. I've already alluded to the Franco-German relationship. France now is much less of a shaping actor in European affairs than it used to be. Britain is mostly absent from the EU. Italy is largely absent from seeking to shape the European Union. And also, it is in a lead position because the most pressing policy issues on the EU external and internal agenda all favor Germany's central position, whether it is crisis management inside the Eurozone, or it is the foreign policy challenge of a changing research in Russia, both put Berlin on a spot in the way that it does not with any other country. So what's Berlin's political agenda in this kind of environment? It is sort of a visionless policy, very pragmatic. The Merkel approach is not to move Europe ahead towards deeper integration, but rather to prevent it from eroding, from disintegrating, to keep the current level of integration. Europe still is, in the reading of the German political class, an important anchor of Germany's role, but not the only anchor of Germany's role. The agenda also has to maintain public support through intergovernmental cooperation, particularly the Merkel, but also in a certain way the Schroeder government. Schroeder was a little bit moderated by the fact that there was Joschka Fischer, who was a coal man in a way, even though he was a green, but he shared with Helmut Kohl the idea that Germany always needs to have a bigger idea about Europe in order to keep on track, to keep on its post-war track, and in order to move Europe and make it more capable of acting. But presently, the Chancellor believes and Schroeder also believed in it that intergovernmental cooperation and the visibility of that cooperation is a good way to keep the German public attached to it, because it would show leaders at the helm. And the European Council, with this sort of approach, has become the principal decision-making body of the European Union, is trending to use the European Commission as kind of an extended workbench. There has been no time in the history of European integration that European Councils have given so detailed assignments to the Commission, with timelines, with benchmarks, with ideas on what it should do than we have seen over the past few years. The German strategy or gender approach to Europe also has it to counter the obvious centrifugal trends and political cleavages inside this EU-28 through a strong focus on rules and due process, which is a traditional German bias. In terms of political culture, we have a trend to focus much more on rules than on political bargaining compared to other countries, because I think many Germans have a mistrust in politics. We think that compromise is a dirty thing. It's dubious, because it is like horse trading. You have to give something and you get something, but it doesn't have to do with the good thing, with how things ought to be. So this kind of normative thinking that is very strong in Germany kind of supports a focus to seek to steer the European Union through a focus on rules, to kind of depoliticize policy-making in the Union, which of course is a difficult proposition at a time when so much in its current dealings is all about politics. And then the rules appear to be ideology rather than kind of a concept of order, which in the thinking of many in the German political class, it still is. It's about the good order of things. Now, this is the situation. In this, I believe Germany has lost to a good degree kind of its strategic sense or the wisdom or wisdoms of earlier periods in the sense that indeed Europe does need an ambition of what it wants to be in order to help to bring together the divergencies and the heterogeneity of this European Union. That has worked very well in the past, but somehow political leaders, including German political leaders, think that with such a heterogeneous union as we have now, it cannot work. I would submit it still can work, but you have to have those ideas and you have to be credible with them. There can't just be bubbles of political spin doctors. You have to have credible actors who believe in what they say. And the current chancellor doesn't have such a vision. And if she would kind of borrow from cold speeches or Adenauer's speeches or Brown's speeches, people wouldn't believe her because it's not her. Currently, there's much less emphasis on talking with the smaller countries. For some reason, German political class seems to have concluded that this traditional mechanism, bring on board the smaller ones, use this as a platform to get things done, is not in high respect. Katherine and I, we were at a conference last year when we tried to discuss with people from member state governments and member state think tanks just this, the interactions between member states. And what we could hear then, and what I hear a lot when I talk to key diplomats from other member states, is the Germans don't talk. They don't come to us anymore. They expect us to come to Berlin and then it's difficult for us to get some face time because everybody's coming to Berlin nowadays, but they don't reach out enough. I think that's the second gap in the strategy. And the third one is that with all the good reasoning about rule-based policy approaches, I think they only work if you try to cover all of your bases. If you just don't rely on rules alone, but you try to build consensus around them. You try to cushion the effect that strict rules application has on other member states. You try to understand the difficulties that there are and you try to put yourself in the shoes of others. Has been said that one of the hubris of powerful actors is that they don't need to learn. In a bit of that you can see in the German case that they think, many in the political class think it doesn't really matter that much whether you bring people in. You seek to modify the expectations and preferences other partners have, but you rely on the fact that they have no choice but to go along anyway. I think that's kind of a backgrounder to some of the divisions of the cleavages, but also of the rather sharp perceptions that shape the attitudes towards Germany these days. And maybe it can serve as an opening to a discussion. As you see, I've left out any deeper arguments about Germany and Greece and the Eurozone, but feel free to raise all of these issues because I'd be eager to respond to them. Thank you very much.