 I'm looking forward to hearing from you about the interesting relationships Ireland has with both of these countries. I'm going to talk a little bit about the report that was mentioned that, I and a colleague wrote on the special relationship as we called it between China and Germany. Which came out in I think May 2012 and the genesis of it was, this was you know I guess the high point of the Euro crisis in a way and we were I remember, I remember having sort of an internal debate with the ECFR about whether the Europe that was emerging from the crisis was a German one or a Chinese one because i'w wedi'i wneud hynny'n cymryd o'r ffordd y Gwyrgyn cyllid yn ymlaen gyda'r gwaith. Mae rhai o'r cymryd o'r adael eu hunain gyda'r Utamol, o'r cyfnod ddwych chi, o'r cyfnod dda, o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r glwyddau. Byddai'r cyfnod o'r adael eu hunain gyda'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r gwaith i'r panhau. Yn hyn, mae coawrthor i fynd y dyfodol, Jonas Prydlo Plesner, angen yw'r moi bod coawrthor nhw'n ddryf yn ystod yn cyfnod i ein ffrwng ddynion i'r eu raifyrwyr. Fe ydych yn gweld ymarfer i eu gutwch, a'u byddoch i'r ch Ramadanol hefydau yn Lywodraeth o'r ffordd fel y dyfodol, yn gweithio'r lyfr a'u'r hyn i'r cael angen. Felly mae'r bobl yn i'r bobl yn fawr i'r llythiadau o'r rhannu yn Gwyl Llywodraeth, Yn cael ei fod yn ei Wingin o gyblwch i Ewrop. Fy enw i weld this very interesting, it seemed to ask relationship between them, that weirdly we thought nobody in Germany was writing about. Which is kind of an interesting thing in itself I think, and I think that this has something to do with the way that Germans are slightly reluctant to even talk about sydd yma i draws ynglyn â rhannu ddylu ers gair y Gerdd Rhaid Ddweud rhannu ddwy. Roedd yn rhaid ddweud hynny o eu gair, a nhw'n ddweud o gyfabaith cyffredinol, a nhw'n ddweud o eu rhannu ddweud. Dyma e chwell ei ddweud cyflym, mae'n ddweud ei pobl sgwrs Chelsea mwy o hyd. Rwy'n ddweud eich hunlauwch â'i cyffredinol, y tîm special relationship made sense. This was particularly, what we particularly had in mind was the so-called government-to-government consultations that began in 2011. This is in effect a joint cabinet meeting that the German cabinet and the Chinese cabinet now have on anual basis. And Germany has this type of arrangement with lots of other countries, it's a German format with countries that it considers important. But the interesting thing about it is that China doesn't have a similar set up with any other country, including with the US. And so from the Chinese side, the fact that they were prepared to do this was an expression, it seemed to us, of how important the relationship with Germany was to them. And hence this term special relationship. And we were thinking, I mean obviously when you talk about a special relationship, you immediately think of the relationship between the UK and the US, but we also had in mind other relationships between individual member states within the EU and countries outside of the EU. So for example France and Algeria or many other sort of colonial relationships, we weren't thinking specifically about the UK-US relationship and clearly that is in many ways very very different from the Germany-China relationship, not least because of the shared values that you have in the special relationship between the UK and the US, which isn't so much the case in the Germany-China relationship. Nevertheless we thought that it made sense to use this term. And what happened when the report was published, as I say in May 2012, was unanimous rejection of this term in Germany. I can remember that we had a panel discussion at the Dutch Embassy in Germany when it was launched. And there was a panel of four Germans, one from the social democrats, one from the Christian democrats, in other words two politicians, an official from the Foreign Ministry and somebody from the business community. So a very broad range of Germans and they all rejected this term, so it's completely inappropriate to talk about the special relationship between China and Germany. False alarm bells was the quote from that evening that stuck in my mind that essentially we were exaggerating the extent of this relationship. Three months later in August of 2012 Angela Merkel visited Beijing and we were amazed to see how, within three months, the chancellery itself had adopted this term, the special relationship, and was trumping up actually the special relationship between China and Germany. So you had this spate of media coverage in August, all of which used this term, special relationship, sometimes referring to our report, sometimes not. But it was just remarkable how in a very, very short space of time what had seemed very controversial actually seemed to become a common place. So I feel as if this report has been sort of vindicated to be honest and in particular some of the trends that we identify and I think have accelerated actually in the two years since we wrote it. And so I would argue that this relationship is as special as ever. This year Xi Jinping is about to visit Germany at the end of March, which as I understand it will be the first of three meetings between Merkel and Xi this year. There is this very intensive relationship that's continued with a new leadership that's taken over in China. And I think the other thing that's happened in the last couple of years is that the implications of this relationship have become a bit clearer. And it's gone in actually a slightly different direction to the things we pointed out in the report. So what I want to do in the next sort of just next 10 minutes or so is to very, very briefly describe the nature of this relationship and in particular to talk about it from the German perspective but also from the Chinese perspective because I think the two sides see this relationship in slightly different ways even though they talk about a win-win relationship. And then, as I say, to talk a little bit about the implications of it for Germany, for Europe and for the West, and in particular to try to put it in a bit of a global context because I think, as I say, one of the other things that's happened in the last two years is that some of the global trends that were happening have accelerated and become a bit clearer. We have, I think, we're increasingly aware of the security issues in East Asia and I want to talk a little bit about how I think the China-Germany relationship plays into that. So first of all, I think the place to start in talking about the relationship between China and Germany, at least from the German end, is the economic relationship. We talked in this report about an almost perfect symbiosis between China and Germany. Essentially China needs technology and Germany needs markets and that's been the basis for this economic relationship that's grown exponentially over the last decade or so. And that in turn, I think, has to be seen within the context of the sort of structural shift in the German economy that took place from the 2000s onwards, where the German economy, which always had been a very export-driven economy, became even more dependent on exports than it was up to that point. And so, for example, nearly 50% of GDP now comes from exports in Germany, which is an extraordinarily high figure, especially for a country of Germany's size. It would be one thing if you have a very small country like the Netherlands that exports that high proportion of its GDP, but for a country the size of Germany, it's quite significant, I think. And then, as I say, on the Chinese side, there's a need for technology, and in particular in the 5th, 12th year, sorry, the 5th year plan that was published, I think, in 2011, there was this decision to focus very much on moving up the value chain, to shift away from export-led growth to increase domestic demand, and to develop more innovation internally within China. And so Germany is a crucial partner for that in terms of particularly, I suppose, two sectors of the economy, where Germany does very, very well, and that the Chinese see as strategic sectors of the economy, which are, on the one hand, machinery, and in particular, machine tools, which is obviously a business-to-business sector, and I suppose, on the other hand, the automobile industry, where German exports have gone through the roof in the last 10 years or so. China is now the largest market for the Mercedes S class, and I think this goes for the German automobile industry in general. So it seems to me that what's happened is you have an increasing dependence, an economic dependence, on China in Germany, and I think this, as I say at the moment, it's an almost perfect symbiosis, as I said, between China and Germany, but there is, I think, in the future some potential for conflict in that relationship, and there have been a few moments over the last few years that have hinted at the possibility of greater conflict between China and Germany. In particular, in 2010, there was a dispute about German access to Chinese rare earths, that dissipated, but then you've also had, within the last year or so, I think, an apparently coordinated campaign in the Chinese media against German automakers, which was interesting particularly because it included Volkswagen, I thought, which had spent a very long time investing in, not just in China, but in relationships in China, manufacturing in China, doing all the things that it's often said you need to do in order to have a strong relationship with your Chinese stakeholders. And yet they, along with Mercedes and BMW, were also a target of this campaign, which showed, I think, how fragile, actually, the position is of these German exporters in China. And then, thirdly, and probably most importantly, you've had this dispute in the last 12 months over solar panels, and I think that illustrates, I mean, a couple of things, but perhaps most importantly, the way that German exporters are coming under increasing pressure from Chinese competitors, and solar panels was a sector in which Germany was the world leader until just a few years ago, and is essentially now almost completely lost that sector to Chinese competitors. And to the extent that, apparently, the German government no longer thinks that it's worth even trying to defend that sector because it's long gone, and so instead would prefer to try to protect other sectors, like the automobile industry, which in the longer term might have greater chances than having a fight with the Chinese over a sector like solar panels that it's already lost. Anyway, I think those things just illustrate the potential for conflict in the future. And the final point I wanted to make on just the economic relationship is that clearly the balance of power in the relationship is shifting every day in China's favour as they move up the value chain and need German technology, it seems to me, less and less, Germany I think is going to have less and less leverage in that relationship. It's already, it seems to me, I won't say too much about this, but it seems to me, it's already started to, this economic dependence on China has already started to shape German preferences in some ways. So I think it is becoming harder and harder for the German government to talk about human rights. There is still a lot of pressure on the German government to do that, particularly from the media in Germany I think, but it seems to me that the German government is increasingly constrained on this type of stuff because of its economic dependence on China. So that's the relationship from the German end, as it were. Let me just talk briefly about how I think it's seen in China, and that will bring me to the sort of broader implications of the relationship. When we went to China to research this report, we met with, we spent a week or so in Beijing meeting with officials and analysts, and we, in each case, would ask them about how they perceived the Euro crisis, how they perceived in particular the big three member states within the EU, and the general message that emerged was, you have a strong Germany, a marginalised UK, and a weakened France, and so there was this kind of sense from Chinese interlocutors that Germany was an increasingly important partner, and that as one of them put it, if you want something done in Brussels, you go to Berlin, in other words, you bypass the EU institutions, and go to Berlin, and this seemed to be the second phase of a shift that had already begun in Chinese perceptions of Europe, round about 2005, when apparently the Chinese decided that they had until that point placed a lot of faith, actually, in European integration, but after the rejection of the referendum in the Netherlands and in France on the new EU constitution, the Chinese seem to have somewhat changed their mind about the direction that European integration was going in, and seemed since then to have focused more on member states rather than on the EU institutions, which they slightly downgraded, it seems to me, in their perception, and then this second phase that seems to have begun since the Euro crisis started, which is that rather than focusing on the member states in general, Berlin is the place to focus on. Anyway, so we spent an hour or so with each of these interlocutors talking about this type of stuff, and then at the end of the hour, they would say to us, now can we ask you a question? I know there are some people here in the room who know a lot more about China and how this works than I do. My impression is that's when you get the really interesting stuff is when they ask you that question at the end, and it's always a very carefully chosen question, and in nearly every case, and as I say this was in the spring of 2012, in nearly every case that question was what do you think about the US pivot to Asia and what does it mean for Europe? The question that was implicit and one or two of our more candid interlocutors asked it explicitly was if there's a conflict between the US and China, whose side is Europe on? What that suggested to me is that, and this makes total sense, is that in Chinese foreign policy, the highest priority is China's own neighborhood, and in particular the emerging strategic rivalry between the US and China in East Asia, and we've seen that particularly in the last couple of years becoming, you know, the tensions increasing around East China Sea, around the South China Sea, and everything else follows from that. And so, you know, it's true that there are some Chinese economic interests in Europe and in Germany in particular. As I mentioned, China needs technology. There is also an attempt to diversify Chinese currency holdings away from the dollar, and so they do have a direct interest in keeping the euro, in the euro becoming actually a reserve currency. However, it seems to me that both of those things are secondary to this strategic interest in what's going on in East Asia. And if you start from that starting point, then I think the relationship with Germany starts to look a bit different because above all, and this is not a secret, this is something that the Chinese talk about publicly, they have this idea of multipolarity. Above all, it seems to me what the Chinese don't want is a united west, particularly one that intervenes all over the place. And so they have this idea of multipolarity in which Europe plays a key role, and the idea is essentially to kind of detach Europe from the US. And then I think the ideal scenario from a Chinese point of view, as I understand it, is that Europe is sort of an independent actor that perhaps triangulates between Europe and the US. And when we listened to the way that these analysts talked about German foreign policy more broadly, in other words, not just in terms of the euro crisis and Germany's European policy, but foreign policy more broadly, and particularly this question of military intervention, for example. We did start to wonder whether actually part of the special relationship from the Chinese perspective is not just a pragmatic response to increasing German power within the EU, but also a sense that on some of these P questions, Chinese and German preferences are actually more aligned than China's preferences with, say, the UK or France. If you think particularly of these military interventions from the Chinese perspective, as far as I can tell, Britain obviously is just a slavish follower of the US, and you can forget about Britain. France took the right stand on Iraq, but then on Libya. Now France seems to be the new US intervening all over the place, and whereas Germany, on the other hand, consistently, albeit for very different reasons, has opposed military interventions. And so it seems to me that from the Chinese perspective you have these three kind of reasons why the relationship with Germany is very, very important. On the one hand, this sense that, as I say, this kind of pragmatic response to increasing German power within the EU. Secondly, though, this sense that the balance of power is shifting day by day in China's favour. In other words, this is a relationship where China has a lot of leverage and in future will have even more leverage. This is a very useful relationship from that perspective. And then thirdly, a perception that if I can slightly end in a provocative way, that strengthening Germany is the way to get the Europe they want, which is one that is prepared to stand up to the US, and in particular that won't get involved in territorial disputes in East Asia. Last two sentences, obviously what's happened in the last couple of years since we wrote this report, as I mentioned, is that these tensions in East Asia have increased. And I'm increasingly imagining, as I say, I'm no longer focusing even so much on the dangers of this relationship to Europe, but to the West more broadly and increasingly imagining a situation in which you have a crisis, whether it's over Taiwan or whether it's over the Senkaku, Diw Islands, or whether it's something in the South China Sea. And Europe will be put on the spot. France and the UK have been trying in various ways, minimal ways to increase security cooperation between themselves and other powers in East Asia. But nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me as if European military assistance will be asked for. But it seems to me perfectly possible that Europe would have to take a diplomatic stand. And in a way, what I'm scared about is that Europe is split right down the middle, as it was, for example, over Iraq, but also that if Europe were to adopt a position of nervous neutralism on an issue like this, then it's not really clear to me anymore what the West means, if anything.