after several years of absence. This is a lunch time meeting, and this particular lunch is a two course meal. The main dish is that EU is a global actor, but there's a small hors d'oeuvres, which some of you may have picked up a paper, which is entitled Britain Island and Schengdon, Time for a Smarter bargain on the visas. Yn gyfafodol yma hwn i'w gweithio'r amser, ac rwyf wedi'u gweithio'r amser i'r hwn arall.  Rwy'n fydden nhw'n gweithio'r bwysig bwysig o'r rhai. Gweithio'r bwysig bwysig yn ei ddweud i'r rhaglen. Rwy'n dweud y cwestiynau ychydig yn ymgyrch yn y dyfodol. Rwy'n ddod o'u ddwych yn ddwych yn ddweud yma ymgyrch yma ymgyrch... ..y'r cwestiynau yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch... ychydig o brydyn yn Y Llywodraeth i'w gwneud y cooeprwysgol yng Nghymru, o'r cyd-ddeithas mewn mynd i'r rhaglen. Yn ymgyrch yn ddweud, mae'n fawr, mae'n mynd i'r hyn o'r cyd-ddeithas y Llywodraeth yng Nghymru, yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch o'r cyd-ddeithas, a'n dda i'w fath o'r rhaid o'r cyd-ddeithas, o'r Y Llywodraeth i'w gweithio'r ysgrifennu, if the White Hall and Westminster could be dissuaded to move. Now may be in this future Olympic year, 2012, the sensitivity of the kind of problems will mount. I was contacted last week by a journalist of the Economist newspaper who was writing an article on the subject for next week. I'm not quite sure what she's going to write, but she may help to open up the subject matter. Felly i'r ffordd yma, oedd eich cyfnodd ar y cyfnodd. Felly, y cyfnodd, y cyfnodd, yr cyfnodd ar y bysnes, mae'n mynd i fewn i'r ddechrau'r Llywodraeth. Felly eich ddweud eich ddweud eich ddweud eich ddweud? Mae'r cyffin iawn. Mae'r cyffin iawn yw'r cyffin iawn, yn ddiflwg am ddiflwg o'r cyffin iawn, sy'n fawr, yn llwyf, yn ddiflwg, a'r ddiflwg, wedi'i gwneud o'r risol, yn ddiflwg sy'n gwybod yn gwybod, yn ddiflwg'r hwn o'r gwaith, yn ddiflwg yn gweithio'r llwyf. Ond, rydyn ni'n cael ei wneud y dyfodol y byddwch yn y DU yn y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, yn y gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r 20, 30, 40-year gweithio. Yn y gallu cyfnodol, rydyn ni'n cael ei bod yn y busnes yng nghymru sydd y Llywodraeth a'r Ysgrifennu Dynes yn 1973, yn ym 30 a 40-year. Mae'r cyflogau systemic, mae'n cyflogau systemic a'r cyflogau serious alsiwnol i ulygu cyflog. Felly, jyf yn ni gael arall, mwyaf i gydweithio'r cyflogau, mae'n droi prices y fwrdd dypa yn ymdweud o'r hunain y pethau yma, ei swyddiadau, y spicellfa a ymdweud o'i gyflogau. ac mae'r ffordd o ymdod rydyn ni'n ddod i'ch weithio gyda'i, ond mae'n trefnwyr o gael ei ddweud. Wrth gyd, mae'r ffordd o'r rhwng ymddangos o'r rhwng ymddangos yw ei ddweud o'r rhwng ymddangos ymddangos ym mhwyl o'u ddechrau ...t MILL fit o teimlo three to say some you can hear them sayingarus in particular. Let us focus on those member states who are really willing in general politically as well as economically to go ahead, indeed Germany too. The question then would be whether this foreign policy business should be cluster around the Eurozone or whether it should be kept to the EU 27. Roeddwn i gael i'w bwysig oherwydd, rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r enw i'r mwyaf, ti'n ddweud lle'r unrhyw unig. Ac rydyn ni'n lluio'n lle'i lle.  Y cyfrifol ymgyrchu'r cyfrifol yn ymgyrchu'r cyfrifol sydd ymgyrchu'r cyfrifol, The whole problem is because our great leaders didn't accept the advice that Professor Martin O'Donoghue and I and some others offered in approximately 1978 in a document called the McDougal Group Report, which some of you may be aware of vaguely, which was all about what basically Berlin would call the transfer function or the fiscal union or transfer union. So, Martin, we went into that in great detail, but that was forgotten, and now we see its cost up to a point. Well, that's on the side. Now, let us get into the main business. Okay, European Diplomacy, a long and noble tradition, Hans Holbein there, and then even earlier, this one, which is rather interesting, this is Marco Polo presenting his credentials in Dadoe, the then Beijing in 1266, Europe's first global ambassador. It's an absolutely impeccable performance of the United Europe presenting itself as one in Beijing. And then we now fast forward to 2009, and now we're in Copenhagen, the infamous climate change summit where the Europeans had a very effectively united position on substance, but the organization of how they presented themselves was like this, and the result was this, namely the famous or infamous meeting of the Bricks and Obama alone with the European Union not present. So this is, I'm afraid, a perfect illustration of the costs of the obsolescence of today's European diplomacy. So the question, mainly going to talk about how European diplomacy should be restructured in a legal as well as bureaucratic and political sense. So the question is, why should this be done? A cost benefit analysis on the function of European diplomacy these days reveals hugely expensive duplication. As you mentioned, I was in Moscow, and so to this day in Moscow we now have 28 European Union embassies with delegation, and all of them are writing their confidential notes, most of the copied out of the Moscow Times as to whether Putin's popularity is going to continue to slide or not. So dear European taxpayer, you can pay for that 28 times over if you feel rich enough and magnanimous enough for the career of all of the diplomats to do so. However, these are tough times, budgetarily. Are they not? And I've become aware in conversation over lunch that the irateplomatic services on a kind of no replacement paradigm, to say when somebody retires, it's not replaced. So I guess that means something like 2% to 3% attrition per year in reduction of the costs. And even Sweden is doing this. The richest and biggest budget surplus country has cut its embassies, bilateral embassies in Slovakia and Slovenia. And also, in Brussels, they abolished the embassy to Belgium. The Belgians complained of it, and so they said, oh no, we haven't really abolished it. We have a man in the permanent representation who's the ambassador to Belgium. So these Swedes, they're quite tough-minded people, and maybe they are sending a message to everybody. So punching below the weight, it's obvious, massive in spite of this huge cost. And then, in addition, what is happening in the world, the content of diplomacy is becoming much more global regulatory policies. For an American account, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University has written an excellent book that some of you may have seen called The New World Order. It's all about the center of gravity in substantive diplomacy going into the area of regulatory policies where the European Union has big competencies. And I would say also, frankly speaking, what are Irish or British or French or Lithuanian national interests in Sri Lanka? OK, here are a few statistics of it. Take the staff numbers. You can't quite read that clearly, but the EU 27 member states employ 93,000 people alongside 27,000 for the United States. And then the UK, France, and Germany are about 2,500 each, 12,500 each, I'm sorry. So they, those major member states are about four times as big as the EU external action service. There's a total number of staff, you've got the local agents, et cetera, but the story doesn't change very much. So there we are, we have 3,000 embosses worldwide. How many of them do you really want to pay for, ladies and gentlemen, taxpayers? Right, now the Lisbon free team was meant to be about getting a world-class European diplomatic service. So how has this been working out? This is what I'm going to go into. In fact, the starting point is not that bad. So I'm going to go into the legal aspects now. Yes, in preparing this book, quite a lot of research work, and so I think I hope it's considered a useful reference. We went into the European Commission's treaties database and discovered that the European Union has signed 249 multilateral treaties and 649 bilateral treaties. Many of these multilateral treaties, I guess Tom O'Dwyer was partly responsible for commodity agreements and that sort of stuff, you know about that. So many of them were relatively small specialized affairs, but still this is legally binding conventions of international law. But they're not all only the olive oil convention of 19 or something or other. Many of them are more important than that and we will go into them in the moment. So, but then the question is what is the status of the European Union actually in the multilateral organizations of the world. In the small commodity agreement, the EU is properly represented normally of sometimes the only contracting party and the only spokesperson. Tom nods his acquiescence, but then mostly in international organizations status is way behind substance of competence. So now we're going into this legal stuff. Treaty of Lisbon at least clarify the competence structure of the European Union, as I'm sure all of you here are aware, the exclusive competencies, then this huge mass of shared competencies. A list about this long. It's really everything except for the exclusive competencies and they are subdivided between what we may call hard shared competencies, agriculture, energy, internal markets, justice and home affairs, environment business, where the EU finds itself being contracting party to international legal business, but alongside the member states. And this leads into this very messy business of who represents the European Union in the area of shared competencies. The Treaty of Lisbon didn't sort this one out. And in the first year post Lisbon, they've been a lot of mucky intra European diplomacy over who should speak the European Union. As in this mercury international convention where standoff between the Commission on the Member States has to who to speak resulted in nobody being able to speak the European Union at the Stockholm International Conference. The Belgian presidency of a year ago actually was impeccable. By the way, this is Belgium. I like living in Belgium very much. As you know, we haven't had a government for 538 days in Belgium. However, they managed, the non-government managed the Belgian presence of the European extremely well. I think even there's a Belgian diplomat here present, right? I don't want to embarrass him. Anyway, the point was here whether the dear member states of the European Union, whether how many of the foreign ministries were saying on the quiet, on the side, actually this Lisbon business was a bit of a mistake. They went a bit far. I think we should use loose provisions to claw back competence for our member state diplomacies and fight over every small procedural issue that is open to controversy. And I would say most of the member states I would criticise for this. I would criticise the British most of all who led the claw back procedure and this has been consuming a disgraceful amount of time for the last year and the year and a half. However, the objective principles, I would say, are clear where the EU is a contracting party. It has to be properly present in the governance of the convention or the international organisation, either exclusively in the exclusive competencies or with member states where they are also present. You can have virtual membership status, I mean in our argument, to say an enhanced observer status where the organisation is not acting in a legally binding manner. UN General Assembly often, OECD for example, but where they are hard legally binding matters of stake, the EU has to be fully present. At the moment it is an ordinary observer in many cases where it should be more present. The precedent for how to do this exists under the name of regional economic organisation. The term is already used in WTO and FAO. There the EU is present or the European Commission has been present as full member and many commodity agreements as well. But the full use of this recognised precedent is way lagged behind the reality of EU competencies and in international air transport, IATAM and international maritime organisation to take these two perfectly clear cases where the European Union has major operational legally binding competence and where the member states will haggle in the anti-chabers of the general assemblies of these organisations to impede the process for the European Union to become full member of these organisations. And that is irrational and deplorable in any reading of the European interest. Now a few important cases that have been moving in the last year, the UN General Assembly I guess many of you certainly the diplomats here present are aware that the EU a year ago made a push to have enhanced status at the UN General Assembly. It went almost to a vote and it was clear that they were not going to get the majority. This came as a terrible shock to the European diplomatic floor at large. How can it be that this wonderful European Union, the embodiment of global enlightenment could not get a majority vote in the UN General Assembly. The conclusion drawn, correctly drawn, was that the European External Action Service and the member states needed to work harder lobbying and they got to work and they did work energetically at lobbying. And so the second time round at the beginning of this year it passed almost on a unanimously basis. And so the European Union now has enhanced status at the UN General Assembly bit in the category that the Palestinian Authority would like to have. I open the parenthesis on the Palestinian Authority. The UNESCO case of course it was operational a few weeks ago and the member states distinguished themselves by dividing three ways. One third of them were for yes and one third of them were for no and the one third were for abstain. Here, ladies and gentlemen, you have 27 diplomatic calls who are all expensively defining their preferred position on Palestinian representation in UNESCO and dividing in every conceivable direction. This is what should be the adjective. I would say it's pathetic and all member states ought to use this case as something to blush over. We are all paying for our 27 diplomatic calls and engaging in this diplomatic dance at UNESCO at great cost to all of our 27 bureaucracies to the point of you all being irrelevant and enhancing the lack of respect that the rest of the world will have. So please the call would be wake up over this sort of business. Now the next case important cases is the IMF Executive Board and I understand from the press but I haven't seen this officially yet that actually the commission in its Eurozone governance package has now got the courage to say actually in the IMF there ought to be a single Eurozone seat. This was discussed, I know, not generally known between France and Germany a few years ago when I believe that Germany was willing to have a single Eurozone seat and engaged in negotiation with France who in the end concluded that this was a sufficiently serious threat to contagion in UN Security Council. That they preferred not to and so it didn't happen but instead last year we had this very painful period of trying to reconcile or try to get European Unions over representation in IMF Executive Board into line with global trends with the rise of the bricks. And this also was a very, very serious learning example for the European Union and I'm not sure how far we have all absorbed this but there was impasse there. The Europeans were choosing to budge and I think the Dutch were the most obstinate of all but not alone. And our dearest and nearest ally of the United States said after a while, look chums, our dear European friends, you realize what is going to happen if there's no agreement on how to revise the board the default position is that the number of seats on the board reverts to about three less than the present board and in accordance with article something of the statutes, the three who are ejected are the three that have the least weights which include India and Brazil. So delicately managed, impeccably managed US diplomacy said, look dear friends, do you wish to be responsible for throwing India and Brazil in the year 2010 out of the IMF Executive Board. So that knocked heads together a little bit to the point of getting this half baked compromise where the Belgians and the Dutch and the Spanish agree to some half baked solutions and that was enough for the time being. However, things have moved on. The drama now is that Eurozone could do with a few hundreds of billions of dollars from IMF and behind IMF other rich states. Oh, but the IMF cannot lend to non states. But monetary unions according to the statutes of the IMF can be present on the board if the monetary union members agreed to it. So the legal political infrastructure is potentially there and this is something that should happen sometime. OK, World Bank is not dramatic like the IMF, but it's the same story, EU largest international aid donor and not on the board of the World Bank. Council of Europe is currently an interesting case. Treaty of Lisbon resulted in the accession of the European Union to the Convention of Human Rights of the Council of Europe. Basic rules and so the Strasbourg Court becomes the supreme arbiter of human rights in anything that the European Union should do. OK, normal rules of the game. If you accept the jurisdiction of the court, you have to enter into the governance of the court. That means that the European Union has to be a full member of the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe and able to appoint a judge to the court, etc. And these proposals actually are currently being negotiated. Maybe somebody in the room knows exactly where it's got to. But I believe that is in the course of being settled in a rather quiet way. But it's a very good example of how to rationalize or bring up to date the governance structures in relation to the legal competences of the European Union. But there are many other cases. I've mentioned IATA and IMO already. But these other cases are many other cases amongst the 249 multilateral treaties. So that's basically my story. Now another critical remark towards the present stance taken in the Council of Ministers of the European Union by our member states. They said, yes, welcome to the European External Action Service and we suggest we attach to this the concept of budget neutrality. That means the budget is frozen basically. So we look forward to your full development of your role in the world, but on zero growth in your budgets. This is such an absurd proposition that they after a while changed the language and said they must move towards budgetary neutrality. Now this comes back to the figures I was showing early on. I mean what in the 21st century should be the structure of European diplomacy. It is today grotesqually obsolete and excessively expensive with a lot of national diplomats doing nothing but engaging in up to a point bureaucratic protectionism. Of course they're doing things which are necessary, but even the visa business of course can be Europeanized for the Schengen area and should be and it's beginning to happen. Of course you have to have commercial interest to pursue, but on the other hand how far are national diplomacy's really effective mechanisms for commercial sales? Well it's up to a point, yes, but I shouldn't overdo it. So dear friends, this is the issue. The EU according to its competencies opposed Lisbon Treaty should in any rational world be more properly represented. There has to be a big shake out in national diplomacy's. You know in this painful budgetary period this is happening under the force of budgetary compulsion more than if you like seeing this European thing develop. But at the same time we're in this world where even our major member states are frankly not very influential in global affairs unless they unify their positions. So this is a story which is not very timely, well it is very timely, not very timely in the sense that the mood is very bad at the moment and is the eurozone going to crack up and that's the end of Europe, says Chancellor Merkel. Okay, so the eurozone thing has to be sorted out whether it's the European Central Bank or the Euro bonds or some hybrid of the two that will be the solution. That has to happen fast, but in any case should, yeah so that has to happen. Right, otherwise the game is over, but that will happen I suppose because the cost of breaking up the eurozone is too big. And so it'll happen sometime in the future and at the same time for the next 20 to 30 years there's progressive development and upgrading of the use world as a global actor needs to be pursued.