So this talk, why your API should fly first class, let's go ahead and jump into it. So a little bit of an agenda, who I am, what is an API first mentality, how we build APIs first, a build for two concept that I have kind of worked out myself over my engineering career, some tools and tricks for API first mentality, and then we'll finish this up, we'll answer some questions.  I'm Bobby tables on Twitter, Bobby tables on GitHub, Bobby tables, you know, every pretty much everywhere with sometimes a hyphen and sometimes an extra underscore. So before we get into this talk, I think that it's very important that we're all on the same page. So an API in this talk is going to be a rest API access via HTTP, application programming interface, we're not talking about like the low level abstractions within code and how, you know, our software talks to itself. And then we're also going to be using the word actor quite a bit throughout this conversation. And that is going to refer to a person, an integration, or really just anything doing anything in our application performing actions. And finally, a front end is a JavaScript application that is talking to your API. So we live in a world where we have Angular, Ember, React Redux, and you know, a whole bunch of others out there still, that's what we're talking about, we're talking about that JavaScript app that's talking to a back end API. So with the terms all set up here, let's talk about the front end first. The front end matters more than ever actually in many ways. So dynamic front end experiences are extremely valuable and expectation from customers. We think that it comes from experiences with Facebook, Netflix and other large tech firms, the fangs of the world with the resources to really be able to invest in these complex front end architectures. It is not easy to build what Facebook has built and what Google and Netflix have built. It's a single page application in many ways with heavy JavaScript usage talking to these back end APIs, GraphQL, JSON, GRPC, and that's really, really heavy investment that they have made into these technologies. Facebook really react based on these experiences. And a dynamic front end experience gives the same sense of quality that a good thud of a car door gives. If you've ever closed the door of an expensive European car, it has a really nice, like AC thud to it. And it was interesting. This is actually a science. It's actually faked in many ways for a lot of cars. So in the 1980s, cars were built and they had that natural thud and it gave people the sense that that car was safe and high quality. And now a lot of companies actually have audio scientists working on the thud sound of a car door and it gives the perception of a sturdy, valuable car. No, I'm not saying that a front end experience needs to be faked or a front end experience can give the sense of a better experience, but it can in some cases and it can be perceived as a much more valuable and well thought out product. It's kind of a sad reality if you think about it. If your website just doesn't have a particular type of fancy sizzle to it, customers may think that it's cheap. So a website like this may provide a ton of value. Six ways my parents taught me financial independence. That's super valuable. But if we look at this website and like the word art logo, you know, you kind of lose that sense of value of value and quality. A dynamic front end experience, however, is a risk. And fire hydrants, my goals to not speak too much about fire hydrant, but we will use ourselves as an example. We're a young company. We're about two and a half years old. And we, you know, we were thinking, do we move this chess piece early? Do do we go and invest in a dynamic front end experience in the earliest days of our business? And after two and a half years and after working at companies like digital ocean and Namely, I've come to the conclusion that you should move this chess piece early. It is you should always start building an API first with a dynamic front end. So the bet we made, we made a bet in the first days of fire hydrant to build an API for everything. Since then, we've amassed over 130 public API end points in just over two years. That's a lot. That's a lot of API end points. We, we built a React Redux front end from day one. We, we have some, you know, HTML render views. We are a Ruby on Rails shop.  Every feature that they, that fire hydrant exposes in the UI actually has an underlying API that our customers can integrate with as well. So said differently, our customers can use all the same APIs that we use for ourselves. And that was a very conscious decision that we made as a business for the long term of our platform. Because an early goal of fire hydrant was to be an integration platform. And what that means is that everything our platform can do, our customers can also programmatically integrate with us. And if you're building an API, all really is you want people to be able to programmatically integrate with you, unless you have some like weirdos that want to read JSON instead of like a beautifully architected page. But I doubt that that's not, that's usually the case. But it's also meant, it also meant that we had to consider our API design earlier. APIs, they can't change. If someone programmatically is interfacing with your API, you can't pull it out from under them and change the schema or remove it or do certain things to it that would break their implementation. They've spent a ton of time integrating with you. Don't do that to them. And that's actually challenging as a startup because we are moving fast. We want to move fast. How do we move fast with an API that can't change? It actually means you have to consider a lot of things very early in the application design of the company. And then another thing that it actually changed is our database design. Our API's first mentality meant that we had to start accompanying for different actors. So remember person, thing, integration, all types of actors that can integrate with our API. Our database had to change just in the earliest days. And we also, again, we built a front end, accessing our API from the start. This created the need for a well-defined engineering roles. Early on, while we have people that can operate full stack, we actually don't hire full stack engineers. We explicitly hire people for the front end or the back end. And for some companies, that's scary. It is you want that person that can do everything, but we want those specialists. We want the people that really know that domain because it builds a better experience for customers in the end. So why don't companies do this? Most companies, I would say, do this. It's expensive. So building an API first and then building a front end is more expensive initially. The benefit actually of having that API early will almost always exceed the initial cost by orders of magnitude. Yes, you are going to spend more money building it back and building a front end separately that talk to each other. That's not, I'm not an ignorant to that fact. But if you want to build a mobile app and then release it, and let's say you're thinking this is two years away, well, do you want to build the API in two years separately and staple it on, or do you just want to have it now, have people integrating with it, and then when you go to build your mobile app, it's there. Customers that integrate with you are also way less likely to churn. And from a pure business point of view, that's very valuable. It is hard, it's much harder to get new customers to retain existing ones. There is a lot of reasons why like building an API and saying it's expensive is just not a good argument in the long run. It's time consuming. It is. But for us, we kind of sat down and we said like, well, we have a lot of faith that this thing is going to work and these features and this product and this company is going to work. Let's add to our risk. We're going to increase our risk profile and just spend more time. We're going to spend more time, we're going to build an API. If this doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But we're around, we're two and a half years old, we are here to stay. And because we made that bet early on, we have so many people that now integrate with us and are happy with those integrations that we can actually say that was the right move to take. So my API first, I've said it a couple of times, what does that mean? And literally it means don't build a user interface until you have an API, literally. That sounds insane, right? How could you possibly do that? Well, here's a way to kind of think of this. Your API should be a bin of Legos. On the right, this is a pretty awesome Lego app from years ago, print ad, where it's kind of using the child's imagination. Like sure, it's two Lego bricks, but to the child, it's an airplane. And or adult like me, who still has Legos and still plays with them. But the point here is that when you provide an API with all these really, really well-defined API endpoints that can attach to each other really nicely and have nice standards and are very sturdy and solid, you can actually start building that airplane and have the imagination to build whatever you want with the given ingredients. And one of the problems that you kind of have to avoid here is when you start mixing your UI with your behavior, your application should have, your application will have a very hard time becoming a platform for others to integrate with if you have this mixed mindset of behavior and UI. They're fundamentally different things. And when behavior is exposed via an API, actors internally or externally, can start to imagine a UI for themselves. They can use the bricks provided to execute their own imagination, their own UI. And that's why Fire Hydrant has the backend engineers that those really, really experienced people on the back and building the API people in the front really experience of building these UIs and wonderful user experiences. So this doesn't mean building APIs blindly. I know that that's what I'm, maybe that could be interpreted, but really it's a breakdown of how we build and end result for our customers. And I'd wager that if you're in this talk, that you're probably what a part of a company that does something similar to this workflow and if you're part of agile, scrum, extreme programming, whatever it is, you have some level of product planning. You have feature specification, wireframes, acceptance criteria and the why you're building it. If you're actually at a very mature organization, that's a really important thing to include. Writing a story kind of comes next, might come from you, a project manager, product manager. It goes in Clubhouse or JIRA and it goes there to be planned. And then you have an iteration planning meeting, you have some assignment given when then and then engineering goes and builds that feature.  And then marketing delivers to customers via an announcement, you move on, you go back to the beginning, you do it again. The problem with this though is that this workflow tends to mix UI and behavior together. And it doesn't really work when you are trying to be an API first mentality. You have to break this down actually. And another thing as I mentioned before, this workflow kind of forces the need for a full stack engineer in many companies. And again, I'm not advocating against full stack engineers but for what we're trying to do by building a platform, you have to break down the way that you build software a little differently. So some of the subtle differences in the process break down here to build an API first. You have to have a different feature to composition. So we have feature teams at Fire Hydrant and one of them is our integrations team. We have UX UI design, we have Jax, we have front-end engineering, we have Hillary, we have product manager Dylan, and we have back-end engineering Justin. And then we also have a concept of we have our site reliability engineers and they kind of float around between the teams. They have mixed responsibility of site reliability as a whole. And so with this composition of a team, what we do is we'll have Jax work with Dylan and Jax will make a great design and this is from a real feature. This is an actual breakdown. These are real screenshots from how we broke down a feature of ours recently called Runbook Templates. And what Jax did is she used Figma to basically says this is what the information is going to be displayed. This is how it's going to be organized. This is the beginnings of the feature. And you can use a Sharpie, right? You could do this on a whiteboard, that's okay. Just presenting the information in some way, at least like with the information that you're going to display, that's the most important piece of this. Because once you know what's going to be on the page, you can start to kind of figure out, okay, well, that starter template over here, that's going to need an API, something coming out of the API to show that. We're going to need something to show the text here. What about this link, what is this? And then on the right, what happened is we created a ticket in Clubhouse to basically represent the information and the API that would need to be created to build this pick. So Dylan and Justin and another gentleman JP wrote this out and worked on it. And what happened is that back into engineering was able to deliver a API endpoint. So the API endpoint actually came asynchronously to the front end work. And this is something mind blowing, but this is really just how we think of our APIs and how we build them and why we do it. Because what's going on while this API was being built is the front end was also being built. And so Hilary is working on the starter template page where she knows that I'm about to have an API. Once the API is released, we're able to kind of mesh the gears together and then we low and behold, we have a create new runbook page with templates. And obviously there's a whole bunch of other API endpoints that come into this, but you get the general idea of how we break down our builds. So why is this better? It's not much different, right? Why is it better? Building an API first, it is a forcing function. If this process would never work unless every person on that team is on the same page. Things would break down very quickly because you're trying to mesh gears here. You're trying to mesh a backend and a friend amongst many people. It forces you to all be on the same page pointing in the same direction. Now we designed our future teams to be very tight knit in order to ship backends and frontends asynchronously. We do use Storyboard out of Airbnb's engineering team. That allows us to kind of plug in what the shape of the API will be early so we can actually continue to progress even if an API isn't actually done yet. And this points everyone on the future team in the same direction. That's very important. It also creates interfaces that your customers can now interface with. A platform that people can integrate with means tighter customer bonds. Again, if you have someone that has spent the time to program that like write code paying that high salary employee to write code against your API, that customer is much more likely to A, be happy and B, like less likely to leave you. It's just a better way of delivering value to customers that are really forward thinking and willing to integrate with you. It generates conversations. We've also noticed this amongst the team that would never otherwise happen. You really have to start thinking about the information on that screen.  It's really easy to just know what the information is going to be on the page because I'm the only one that needs to know. But when you have two people that need to kind of pay attention to what's on that screen, it generates conversations that would otherwise maybe not happen. So let's talk about a different concept now. Let's talk about building for two and how to build an API that lasts. So API access and why you should never tie records to users. API meant for computers. So while a user will make a request to your API from your front end, you must account for other actors. So that means that typically in an API, you make a request to the API, maybe it creates some data, a note, a comment, whatever it might be. That's usually associated to a user and a user only. That's how a lot of APIs work. That's how JIRA's API works. That's how Salesforce's API works. It's a very, very common pattern. But that's a problem actually because when you only have access to your API like that, it actually, it really restricts the integratable way. It really restricts the way that someone can integrate with that API because computers are not people. They're not users. They are bots, they're robots. Maybe they're integrations. You have to accommodate for multiple types of actors against an API. And you have to build in authentication and authorization nodes that allow for both people and programs to have a merry world together. Your underlying data model needs to change to support this idea. So some considerations for data model when you're building APIs first. Your data model needs to support the idea of multiple actors creating and modifying data. It has to do this. Most systems in my career and out in the wild, they have this concept of a God object, the user. Everything has an association to the user. That needs to change if you're gonna build an integratable platform because not users, people creating data all the time now. We have integrations creating data. How do you associate to an integration when your entire data model is only pointed at the user record? It's not possible. You have to break this down. So what I recommend is you can use polymorphism or a single entity with a type key on it to achieve this. So let's break those down. This is FireHydrogen's data model. Again, we have multiple concepts of actors, users, integrations, bots. And what we've done is we've made our database schema heavily polymorphic, heavily heavily heavily polymorphic. This allows us to store multiple actor types on records such as an incident. We are an incident management platform. So this is a snippet from our database. Actually, this is, you know, if you wanna build part of the incident table for FireHydrogen, here's part of it. So this is creating a table called incidents in Postgres. And at the bottom here, you can see these orange bolded keys, columns created by type and created by UID. Now, the difference here is that on a lot of databases, you would only have created by user ID. And that's a single ID and that ties to a user record. But what we're doing is we're actually having this type column to be able to say it's the ID of an integration, an ID of a bot or an ID of a user. So when someone creates an incident against our API, post V1 incidents, maybe they are acting on our API as a bot. And what we do is we say, oh, it's the bot that's authenticated against the API right now and they're creating an incident. And when we create the incident, we say, well, the bot created it, not this user. And that is, you know, this is one way that you can start to introduce multiple actors in that concept of build for two. When you start to build for two, you get to build for many. It's just a way of thinking. You don't have to build it explicitly for two. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying break out of the idea that items are associated to only one thing. It is a change that will fundamentally make your software more flexible in the future. I wanted to present an alternative data model. So at Fire Hydro, we've been doing this data model for a long time. And we've had some ideas on, you know, what would we do different? And I'd actually propose this nowadays, hindsight. I think this is actually better. You know, there's trade-offs to both, but and they both work and accomplish the same thing, but for the purposes of the talk and making sure that people come away with something interesting, I would do it this way now. I would actually have an actor's record in my database that's extremely simple. And then what I would do is I would actually make all of my other associations point to the actor. And then what I would do is I would make the actor record a polymorphic thing. And the reason you would do that is that it actually cleans up your database to the point where incidents, instead of having two columns, they can have actor ID, Runbook can have created by actor ID. And if you need to know, if you really need to know, was it a user that created or bought or an integration, you still have that foreign-gea association. So it's a little simpler, a little bit more flexible because you can continue to add different types of actors up here easily. So just a proposal, if you are getting something out of this talk so far, I would actually build it this way now if I were starting over. But both of these unlock the same things. So on the right side, this is a view from our application. It's a timeline. We store a timeline during an incident. So when you go into a retrospective, it's just readily available for you. So you can now separate the types of actors in your application with these. Not everyone is a user anymore. And that unlocks some cool things. So if you see, this icon represents that Daniel Connemity is a fire hydrant user, but this information was actually added by a Slack user. So different types of actors integrating in the same feature because of this data model that supports this. If our data model associates everything to a user via the API, what happens when that person leaves the company? This is a caveat, right? All of your integrations that you built with that user's account also break. If you think like, oh, if we have a software engineer that built all of our integrations and that software engineer gets an offer to another company and they leave, we deactivate their account and that means all the integrations down here also break because the API is not in requests. So you need to kind of break out of this model and support bots and integrations so you don't hit that type of scenario. The other advantage of this is that all of this information is still created via the same APIs that our front end uses. Nothing has changed that way. So another concept that comes in the build for two arena theory is you want to allow for many and constrain to one. What I say here is like think two features ahead. It doesn't mean that you're gonna over engineer something or over plan, but it's okay to entertain a feature that could like plausibly be built in the future. Possibly, I think that's a word. But a golden rule is it's okay for an array to have one element in it in your API. I know that sounds crazy, but if you're building an API and you have one association and you got, I'll just have the one association, you just add it to your API. Keep in mind, your API can't change. It's okay to have an array with one element in it. And I'll show you an example of how that has bitten me in the past. But it's a common mistake to restrict your JSON schema to a singular object. And then later on, you need to add another. Much easier to constrain to one in code, but allow for multiple in your database. Databases are very, very, very hard to change. It's hard to change a database schema. It is way easier to allow for many in your database and constrain to one in your code. Code is way cheaper to change. So let's talk about a story. I used to be a staff engineer at Namely. I was on the SRE team. I also built and led the core services and integrations team. I was responsible for all types of APIs internally, externally, a lot of responsibility for how people integrated with Namely. And this is a story about where Build42 would have saved me a headache at Namely. So if you work at a company today, you're sitting there, you probably have a manager. And logically you think, I only have one manager. And you would be right most of the time. But the problem is that there's actually a concept in HR called a dotted line report. And this is a snippet from Wikipedia, but basically what it means is that there's another manager in the organization that might need your attention and might hold you accountable for certain things. So if you think about it, Namely, HR company, we store your manager, your dotted line reports, we store all this information. And it started to build API that exposed who a person reported to. So API endpoint of the profile. So we can see here, this is an ID of a profile, the email of that person and who they report to. So ID 122, I report to Dylan at firehydron.io. So pretty simple, but you can notice, you know, this is a JSON object. This is a squiggly line. It is not an array. I can only have a singular reports to in here. Well, what happens if we were to have built this for two? So the JSON only supports one reports to field. Even though the product now supports multiple reports to the dotted line managers, maybe my colleague Dan is also requires my attention and is holding me accountable to things. He is a dotted line manager of mine. How do I report that in my API? So the situation is a worst case scenario because if our JSON APIs can't change, we built this API and people started integrating with it almost immediately. And we can't change it without a heavy notice or complete deprecation of that key in that API endpoint. It is a lot of work and time to do that. We could have avoided this. We had just thought like a couple of features ahead. If we just had a discussion about reporting structures and all that, like we could potentially avoided this. Reports could have been an array. It could have been, okay, the first element of this array is Dylan. And then the second element, if this happens, is Daniel with a type key called dotted line. This is better because it means that people that integrated with our API don't have to change their clients. It works the same exact way. And that's why I think people really should start considering like think two features ahead. You're not going to over engineer something to the point if you think two features ahead with some level of credibility that something will be coming up. So what have we built for two? I mean, these opinions are mostly from putting my hand on a hot stove over the last 10 years. I know I look like I'm a teenager, but like, this is the last 10 years. Early decisions don't always have to be got to go fast mentality. They don't. You can often build a model that will last you for years if you think two features away. What if we may have users now, but will we have companies? There is a really, I don't know if it's still out there, but GitHub has a story about this. GitHub used to be only users. And then they introduced the concept of organizations. It took GitHub nearly a year to support that concept. Not because creating organizations was hard, but being able to associate users to organizations was hard. What if we have multiple payment profiles? That's another thing that is very common in websites. You don't need to build the feature that will allow you to add multiple, but you should be thinking, we might need that and build your software to accommodate for that possibility in the future. So some tools and tricks to deliver great APIs. Document in tandem. So while we're building our APIs at FireHydron, we actually document our APIs in the code that is powering them. So while you're building your API, please or please document it as you go. No one wants to go back and document 100 API endpoints. No one. Use the OpenAPI specification too. So swagger, swagger.io, it will allow you to standardize your documentation as well as generate clients, generate documentation. It's a good standard to just kind of follow. Also called the OpenAPI initiative. Again, we are Ruby, Ruby on Rails core application. We have some go applications, you know, scattered around too, but use something that plugs into your framework that can generate OpenAPI specs for you. We use Grape, we've been using Grape for a very long time. It is the API endpoint framework that we use, and then we use Grape Swagger, which can read our API spec and Grape and actually generate beautiful OpenAPI spec compatible JSON. So really, you know, try to do this early. If you're not, if you have an API already, like please take the time, go back, document those API endpoints with Swagger, it really will be a better experience for, and even yourself actually, if you integrate against your own APIs. So getting towards the end here, documentation hosting. So Stoplight, Stoplight is actually sponsoring this conference. They are not sponsoring me. There are a few options out there for API documentation, but I personally, I recommend Stoplight and prefer it. They can read OpenAPI spec. They've done a nice job of that. They've been doing it for a long time. You said it, namely, as well. They can generate nice try-up pages for every endpoint. It's just a really kind of nice product. It does what it does very, very well. There are a few others out there. If you type in API hosting service, I'm sure you'll find that. So, you know, kind of tying all together. APIs have firehiger. They are a first-class feature. They're not an afterthought. We are APIs all the way down. All of our customers can access the FireHydrant API that our UI does. I joke and I say, if you just absolutely loathe the FireHydrant UI, you could build FireHydrant again on our APIs. We really are that open and honest about our APIs and the availability of them. And it's important because it means our customers get the same guarantees that our front-end gets. It's not an afterthought. It is the thought. Open API spec has also allowed us to generate documentation websites and clients with ease. We use our own clients within our application and also our integrations as well, such as our Kubernetes integration, CLI integration. They're all powered off of this open API documentation that we have built for ourselves. Developers.FireHydrant.io, if you want to check that out. So, what I'm going to close up here and hopefully this has come across, but build an API first. Future you will love you for it. Promise. And that's all I have. Thanks.


So welcome to the 2019 Schuman Lecture which is supported by the John Monet Centre for Excellence in EU Australia Economic Cooperation. I'm grateful that members of the advisory board, comprising of Ms Alison Burroughs, Mr Jason Collins and Ambassador Michael Poulch representing DFAT, the Europe Australia Business Council and the EU delegation to Australia respectively are present here today. The ANU is privileged to be founded on a site of deep history and knowledge and so I acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whom's traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. The Schuman Lecture series celebrates remarkable achievement of European integration since its modest beginnings in 1951, announced in a declaration by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. The ANU has recognised this achievement and foresight by coordinating the lecture series, the Schuman Lectures, since 1996. Eminem Europeans and Australians, including Lott Britain, the then Vice President of the European Commission, Dr Cecilia Maumstrom, current Commissioner for Trade and Justice Michael Kirby of the Australian High Court have been past Schuman speakers. I'm also pleased to acknowledge in the audience today Mr David Ritchie, former Australian Ambassador to Germany, who presented the 2017 Schuman Lecture. I can't see David here but I'm sure he's in the midst somewhere. Friends, tonight we break new ground for we have never had a speaker from the ANU to present the Schuman before and I cannot think of anyone more distinguished than our Chancellor, Professor the Honourable Gareth Evans, ACQC. Professor Evans took up his appointment as Chancellor of the ANU in 2010 and he has led the university from strength to strength for more than a decade now while remaining equally engaged with global affairs throughout this period. Professor Evans was a Cabinet Minister in the Hawken Keating Labour Government from 1983 to 1996, serving as Attorney General, Minister for Resources and Energy, Minister for Transport and Communications and Foreign Minister. During his 21 years in Australian politics he was leader of the Government in the Senate and Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives. As one of Australia's longest serving foreign ministers, Professor Evans is best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN Peace Plan for Cambodia, bringing to a conclusion the International Chemical Weapons Convention, founding the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum and initiating the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. From 2000 to 2009, Professor Evans was President and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the Independent Global Conflict Prevention and Resolution Organisation. Gareth Evans was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2012 for his quote, Eminence Service to International Relations, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, as an advisor to governments on global policy matters, to conflict prevention and resolution and to arms control and disarmament. Professor Evans has many more achievements and honours that will take me all evening to list and it would of course detract from the main reason for this gathering, which is to engage with the wit and the wisdom of the Chancellor. So without further ado, please welcome to the podium Professor, the Honourable Gareth Evans, to deliver the 2019 Schuman Address. Thank you, Jackie, for that very generous introduction. So, Excellencies, colleagues and friends of the ANU, thank you for the privilege of being able to talk to you. For as long as I can remember, I've been deeply personally attached to Europe and to the European Union ideal. For multiple reasons, cultural upbringing, early education, living and working experience, and I hope also some rational analytic judgment as well. It began, as you would expect, with Britain. Australia in the 1950s was as Anglo-centric and Anglo-Philic as any country could be. And Enid Blighton, William Biggles, and Arthur Meese, Children's Encyclopedia, to find my worldview far more, I have to say, than any Australian, certainly any American books, let alone any influence of any kind from Asia. And my continuing love of the United Kingdom has survived even the combined advent of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. But my fascination with all things European didn't for very long stop at the Channel. Throughout my formative decades, the successive post-war waves of non-British immigrants to Australia were almost wholly from continental Europe. And just as this fundamentally changed the way in which the whole country looked and felt and fed itself, it certainly broadened my worldview. Beyond that, University in Melbourne and then Oxford studying law and humanities, including the great philosophers, my frame of intellectual reference was wholly European. And reinforcing it all has been my lived experience in the UK for about two years while studying at Oxford. In Brussels, as Jackie has noted, for nearly 10 years, much later on after leaving politics while leading the international crisis group. In Budapest as well, teaching at the Central European University for several weeks over a three-year period. And of course, just travelling throughout my whole adult life, often and intensely through nearly every corner of the continent, with only, I think, Andorra and San Marino left on my check-off list. I love so many of us do. Europe's countryside, cities, art, music, literature, food and wine, of course. And I also have a pretty intense sense of the richness and complexity of the interlinkages of European history and the continent's cultural and intellectual traditions. In fact, the whole Western civilization thing. So you'll understand me saying, Oh, Ramsey Centre, what might have been, what might have been at ANU, if only you had been a little bit more sensitive about academic freedom and our need for academic autonomy in putting together that course you wanted so generously to fund. But be that as many. I should, perhaps, I should perhaps also make clear that I've never had any difficulty in comfortably accommodating all this emotional and cultural affection for Europe, which goes back all the way to my childhood, with that which I have been developing for Asia throughout the rest of my life. It's not a matter of either or, it's a matter of both and. Nor have I felt any difficulty at all in accommodating my affection for Europe and the European Union, which I'll come to in a moment, with a theme that was so central to the conduct of foreign policy and the Hawke and Keating governments, which I served as a foreign minister, and with which I continue to strongly believe, namely that Australia's Asia Pacific geography will determine our future much more than our European history. It is possible to recognize the important role that a player or group of players can have in the world at large, even if it could be playing more of it, while accepting that its significance for us in Australia is not economic relations apart, quite as central as it might be for others. When it comes to the European Union and the whole idea of European unity, my attachment is not just cultural and emotional, but very much, I hope, rational and analytical. Throughout my adult lifetime, I have loved the idea of the European Union above all else, for the reason that, like many others, I've regarded its creation given a terrible history of conflict between its member states above all in the catastrophic 20th century as the most important single conflict prevention enterprise the world has ever seen. Although so much of the EU storyline has always been and remains about economics, its real achievements have been geopolitical. That was, of course, supremely well understood by Robert Schumann, the French foreign minister, whose legacy we honor in this annual lecture. His means were economic, but his motivation was unequivocally political. To bind the continent together in such a way that future war above all between France and Germany would become inconceivable. As David Ritchie reminded us in this lecture two years ago, Schumann could not have been clearer in his seminal declaration of May 1950, proposing that French and German production of coal and steel be placed under one common high authority. As he said, the solidarity its production thus established will make it plain, sorry, the solidarity its production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not only unthinkable, but materially impossible. And again, as he put it more generally, the contribution which an organized and living European, Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to maintenance of peaceful relations. A united Europe was not achieved and we had war. The story of the evolution, Schumann's dream of European unity was for at least the next 55 years an overwhelmingly a success story, albeit one with many bumps and stumbles along the way like the economic fallout from the 1970s oil crisis, the less than stellar handling of the Balkans political crises of the 1990s, recurring tensions over the management of the enlargement process, some of which issues have been addressed in previous Schumann lectures. Not only did war become unthinkable between any of the EU's rapidly expanding members, but the accession process was one of the most, if not the most, successful democracy promotion exercises in history. The civilizational lure of Western Europe was compelling. The belief in the superiority of the Western economic model was absolute confidence in the effectiveness and longevity of both the continental and transatlantic institutions created by the statesmen of Schumann's generation was for many decades close to absolute. The whole story has been amply documented, I think perhaps most brilliantly by my late friend Tony Jutt's book, Post-War, is magisterial history of the continent from 1945 to 2004, ending with the entry of the Central Europeans into the EU. And also I think in Ian Kershaw's very recently published The Golden Age, Europe 1950 to 2017. All that said, I think we have to acknowledge, as Kershaw's book does, that Europe's and the Europeans' unions, Golden Age, has not been quite so golden over the last decade or so. A number of the key assumptions which the EU has traditionally made about itself have shown serious signs of unraveling. Its leaders are now confronting and unprecedentedly complex and often interrelated, a set of economic, security, social and political challenges, all of which have significant implications for both Europeans' Europe's own capacity to meet the needs and aspirations of its citizens and at the global level, the Europe's capacity to punch at the weight it could and should. In many ways, Europe is at a crossroads, whereas Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, recently starkly described it in language that is, no doubt, seems a bit exaggerated, but nonetheless gives us plenty to think about, where on one side it could possibly consolidate its collective potential to be a co-equal power in a tripolar world, but on the other side faces the prospect of becoming, as he put it, roadkill in a Sino-American game of chicken. In this lecture, I want to look at the nature of the main challenges currently facing Europe's major players, the implications for the wider global order and to offer my perspective for what it's worth, on how Europe might maximise its chances of not becoming a global also-ren. So let's begin with the economic challenge. One of the central sustaining assumptions of the EU about itself, the inherent superiority of the Western economic model, and the bankers and the finance ministers who managed it, was left reeling by the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, which had a devastating impact on jobs, savings and companies across Europe, and particularly in the weaker economies of the European South. The EU survived the continent's worst recession for 80 years, but discontent and division about the way it's economically managed has continued. The fundamental problem within the eurozone are they disconnect between centrally determined monetary policy but sovereignty dispersed fiscal policy with the power to tax and spend and invest remaining in the grip of national governments remains as unresolved as ever. Hints a couple of years ago that Angela Merkel might be just prepared to consider the manual Macron's proposals for a common eurozone budget and even a eurozone finance minister have come to naught. The Germany's traditional extreme caution on these treaty reform issues and general passion for austerity housekeeping strongly reasserting itself. Significant income disparities continue to exist within the union to some extent between the core and southern periphery members but also now very acutely between the core member countries Germany France Benelux and the Scandinavians and for now the UK and those from central and eastern Europe. Apart from contributing to the social and political challenges that I'll come to shortly this has had troubling brain drain and energetic youth drain implications as many migrate internally from the periphery to the core which in turn makes relative economic gains and the periphery harder to achieve. When it comes to global economic policy issues Europe's overall size the EU of course collectively being the second largest economy in the world just behind the United States in nominal GDP terms and China and PPP terms means that it should arguably be as just as significant a player as the United States and now China but that has manifestly not been the case. Part of the problem some analysts agree is that without a reserve currency of similar credibility Europe's financial might can't begin to match that of the United States and the euro can't be a serious rival to the dollar unless it's radically reformed in a way that France wants but Germany has continued to resist, not least because this would be likely to increase the euro's value to the point perhaps of causing real pain to Germany's very successful export driven economic model. Another part of the problem here is very real continuing division within the EU about how to respond to the economic power and the political influence that is increasingly being seen to accompany it of its second biggest trading partner China. Although European companies have exactly the same legitimate concerns as Americans and others including ourselves in Australia about many aspects of Chinese practice including market access, intellectual property, theft, cyber security, risk and some problematic Belt and Road initiative investments, there's been a deep reluctance by European policymakers to communicate that concern with anything like the vigor now being embraced by Washington. While some of that reluctance is born of an entirely understandable lack of confidence in the Trump administration's ability to act intelligently and even the most defensible causes with certainly no mood in Europe to follow the U.S. down the path of full-on trade war and large-scale forced economic decoupling it's also a function of significant resistance within the EU from those including but not confined to Greece Portugal and Hungary who want more Chinese investment oppose any kind of strict screening of it and generally don't want to do anything to rock the Chinese boat. Challenging problematic actions and practices of your biggest economic partner is never easy as Australia and many other countries in their own region are aware but when you are of the size and the combined European when you're the size and the potential clout of the combined European economies you do have pushback options not available to us lesser mortals come to the security challenge another sustaining assumption of the EU which has come under intense challenge in recent years or to be more precise since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 is that U.S. security protection was absolute and a given that manifestly no longer is for U.S. allies everywhere who are clearly seen by the president more as incumbrances than assets with him seeming to have a particularly visceral distaste for his European partners America first for Trump oops where am I America first for Trump means just that and Washington's European allies both in the EU and NATO contexts are rapidly coming to the realization as a we in Australia in the Asia Pacific that less America more self-reliance again have to be the watchwords of our defense future the security challenge for European policymakers has become that much more acute with Russia Russia's return over the last decade to many of its bad old habits including of course outright intervention in Georgia Ukraine Sabre rattling in the Balkans playing a cynical spoiler role in the UN Security Council and elsewhere embarking on a major modernization of its military capability and in this respect it has to be said not doing much more than the United States being prepared to play again with nuclear fire while it's hard to believe that Russia whose GDP after all is not much bigger than Australia's important to remember would ever deliberately initiate a major war with any EU or NATO member state its behavior has obviously been destabilizing and as always defense planners have to act on the base of capability rather than current presumed intent although EU members have been focusing more in recent years than in the past on achieving a significant degree of strategic autonomy with the general framework set by the 2016 global strategy the EUGS supplemented by PESCO the permanent structured cooperation and the European Defense Fund initiatives serious self-reliance is is much more easily said than done given not only where Europe is starting from in terms of defense expenditure but the continuing reluctance of so many of its players above all I have to say again Germany to be seen to be acquiring real military power reluctance to be seen to be doing that defense expenditure across the EU on latest 2018 World Bank figures is 1.5 percent of GDP with only six of its current member states France the Baltic trio Poland and Greece meeting the NATO target of 2 percent the case of Germany lagging well behind at 1.2 percent the obvious willingness of most of the country's elite to play a more powerful international role both in defense and foreign policy generally I have to say an entirely welcome enthusiasm is for understandable but I think hardly still relevant historical reasons not shared by most ordinary Germans therein lies the problem the social challenge the social policy challenges currently facing European policymakers themselves partly a function of both economic challenges the anxiety felt by so many Europeans about their economic future and security challenges albeit ones of a less existential kind than those posed by the traditional continental nightmare of direct conflict with Russia the wars I'm thinking of particular the wars in Iraq Libya Syria and Yemen which it has to be acknowledged European diplomacy has done little to prevent or to contain have helped feed a wave of terrible recent terror attacks in major European cities which in turn compounded by economic anxiety have generated a massive backlash against Muslim immigration below Angela Merkel's personal decency in responding to the massive surge of asylum seekers and other unregulated arrivals from the Middle East and North Africa was one bright ray of principled light in an otherwise very dark period for Europe and although the number of arrivals and as a consequence some of the heat of the issue has subsided since the height of the refugee crisis four years ago the domestic policy challenges posed by it have not gone away and are still dividing EU member states and have significantly contributed to the populist backlash which has been roiling the policies of so many of them when it comes to the EU's political challenges collectively and individually it's fair to say that despite the current triumph of utterly unpalatable illiberal democracy in Orban's Hungary and the varying degrees of visibility and influence of other illiberal and anti-european parties in recent times in the UK, France, Poland, Estonia and Germany among others the feared widespread triumph of really ugly far-right parties has not eventuated and seems for the moment contained they didn't get much of a toehold the kind of toehold that many expected in the EU Parliament elections in May this year and while the AFD the alternative Germany party did surge into recent eastern state elections early this month it was not by enough to turn out the really the ruling coalitions there what has been happening is a real fragmentation in voting patterns with a very visible decline right across Europe in the capacity to win elections and govern of the traditional centre-left and centre-right parties which in turn has made stable government and balanced policy making much more difficult than it has perhaps ever been this was evident to an almost caricatured extent in the UK vote for the EU Parliament with the Labour Party winning less than 14 percent of the primary vote and the Conservatives less than 9 percent a reflection of both the rise in popular sentiment and the major parties inability to respond effectively to it which of course lies at the heart of the Brexit debacle well for now at least there's no other country in the EU currently contemplating breaking away from it the ongoing brexit crisis is clearly the major political challenge facing the union and if nothing else a massive continuing distraction for its leadership it's hard to exaggerate the scale of the damage that will be done the Britain's departure does become a reality and not only if it goes ahead on a no-deal basis although in those circumstances it's as has been amply documented by the Johnson government's own civil service advisers the damage will be even more alarming to the British economy on some analysis to the wider European economy certainly to the prospects continued peace in Ireland and indeed to the constitutional future of the entire UK for the EU to lose the UK's economic weight its foreign policy voice and its contribution to regional defence policy making in an EU context will be to dramatically diminish dramatically diminish the union's collective capacity to be the kind of third force rules-based order supporting balancing voice that the world arguably needs now more than ever as the United States increasingly abandons its traditional role and China becomes ever more assertive and influential. This I guess isn't the occasion to spend very much more time on Britain's Brexit brain fade but I can't forebear from putting on record my long-standing view of just how utterly wrong-headed is the notion of the Anglo-sphere so beloved of former Australian Prime Ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott former foreign minister my predecessor Alexander Downer and of course the motley crew of opportunists and 19th century true believers who make up the current UK government. The idea that a self-exiled United Kingdom will find a new global relevance and indeed leadership role as the centre of a collection of Anglo-phone compatriots. The basic problem for the Anglo-sphere advocates is that none of the candidates for membership of this new club are likely to have the slightest interest geo-strategic economic or political in joining it economically the notion that a linguistically and culturally driven multilateral partnership or new bilateral agreements between pairs of anglers like the UK and Australia could deliver more in trade and investment terms than the other bilateral regional and global agreements now in place or being negotiated is frankly nonsensical. The UK's total trade with Australia plus Canada plus India plus New Zealand is less than with just one medium-sized European partner the Netherlands. Geo-strategically the main game as it has been for most of recorded time is geography rather than history and the biggest game of all for the foreseeable future is the emerging contest for global supremacy between the United States and China. Should the United States again get serious about enlisting allies and partners to help it stare down any overreach by China and East Asia some Anglophone countries like Australia, India, Singapore, Malaysia maybe Canada in this context can certainly bring something to the table but more important than anything the United Kingdom could contribute are Japan, South Korea and the very non-Anglo Southeast Asian countries especially Indonesia and Vietnam maybe Thailand as well and to the extent that tensions persist with Russia that require counterbalancing while the United States could obviously expect to draw support within NATO from its fellow Anglophones in Britain and Canada it's not self-evident what Australia and New Zealand and a bunch of other far-flung Anglos in Africa Asia and the Pacific could usefully bring to that particular table. Probably the hardest truth the Anglos fear dreamers must confront is that there is just no mood politically in Australia or any of the other candidate countries of which I'm aware to build some new global association of the linguistically and culturally comfortable whatever residual Anglo identity we may have this is just not the main game for any of us anymore. So why the world needs Europe to fire quite apart from Australia's obvious strong economic interest in having a stable and prosperous Europe to trade and invest with and that speaks for itself given that the EU as a block is Australia's largest source of foreign investment the head of the United States our second biggest trading partner after China and our third biggest export destination after China and Japan. It's very much in the global interest and Australia simply as a responsible member of the wider international community that Europe punch economically and geopolitically at its global weight. Economically Europe's voice matters above all else because as European Union trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrong sorry Malmstrong clearly articulated in her Schumann lecture last year which Jackie referred to it remains so instinctively committed to free and open global trade as a win-win for all to a strong rule-based approach to the management of that trade with a continuing central role for the world trade organization and its dispute resolution mechanism systems and to decent standards on labor environmental health and consumer protection and does so in an environment where the present United States administration has abandoned just about every one of those values which it has traditionally championed and we're China's commitment to many of them remains highly questionable. The trouble is as was pointed out major article in foreign affairs just last month is that far from trying to translate those values into a coherent and distinctively European strategy Europe has gone to great pains to avoid confrontation with either the United States or China which has largely relegated it to the sidelines at a time when its influence has never been more necessary. It does need to to speak with a strong and common voice against the more egregious challenges of the United States to the economic order mobilizing multilateral support elsewhere just as it has done on the Iran nuclear issue to which I'll come in a moment and it needs at the same time to engage to join more robustly with the United States and other like-minded in pushing back in the WTO and elsewhere if and when China plays fast and loose on market distortions on intellectual property on cyber theft. Europe won't add value by initiating or joining others trade wars but it certainly would add value by more aggressively pursuing economic peace and the decent standards which will help sustain that peace. Geopolitically Europe's role matters enormously again in a world where principled voices are in short supply, where voices of calm against the sabre rattlers have become ever more needed and where multilateral approaches to problem-solving particularly on those global and regional public goods issues quintessentially climate change which Kofi Annan used to describe as problems without passports when action on these issues has never been more necessary. It's been a recurring concern of mine over many years certainly both when I was foreign minister and when I was based in Brussels for nearly a decade as president of the international crisis group that despite the potential importance despite all the efforts that have been made to more effectively institutionalize it with the creation of the position of high representative for foreign affairs and security policy and the external action service it has to be said it's been my concern for a very long time that the EU's contribution on so many of these fronts has so often been so limp. Partly that's obviously been a function of always having to so many disparate voices to accommodate and coordinate the herding cats problem national sovereignty realities so well described by then external relations commissioner Chris Patton and his sherman lecture way back in 2001 but a key factor I have to say again has always been that it's hard to play the role of world power when your biggest and richest member simply doesn't want to accept that kind of responsibility. Happily there are present signs that European and German in particular frustration with the Trump administration on multiple fronts and a growing perception that the United States might no longer be as reliable a protector of European security as has always been assumed are encouraging the EU to play a more assertive and effective role with exhibit one in this respect being the Iran nuclear deal JCPOA joint comprehensive plan of action. It was a slow start I know because as head of crisis group I was personally playing a back channel role with the Iranians and we had identified and published as early as 2006 all the ingredients of the delayed limited enrichment deal which we knew we knew then the Tehran was prepared to accept but which deal was not finally actually struck until 10 years and 20,000 centrifuges later the trouble then was that while the EU unlike the United States would at least talk to Tehran it always is so often elsewhere found reasons not to act against United States wishes but the EU with the UK France Germany and the high representative all around the table did ultimately play an absolutely central role in the successful JCPOA P5 plus one negotiation and very importantly the Europeans have played a laudably tenacious role since in trying to hold the deal together after the US under Trump again totally indefensively withdrew from the agreement in May last year with the latest European initiative being President Macron's efforts to mobilize a 15 billion credit line to finance Iranian oil sales it has to be acknowledged that the odds are against that effort succeeding because the United States capacity backed by the dollar's dominant reserve currency standing US capacity to apply secondary financial sanctions against almost any company anywhere defying Washington's blanket ban on any dealings with Iran continues to be a massive disincentive against any attempts to bypass it and the whole enterprise has to be acknowledged has become more complicated in recent days with Iran's evident complicity in the strikes against Saudi Arabian oil facilities that cooling some of the European enthusiasm for going out on a limb against the United States but all that said Europe's efforts to hold together the JCPOA have sent a message that will be not lost to anyone hopefully including both President Trump and Xi Jinping that the EU and its major member states are willing to do more to make Europe's balancing presence felt on the global stage there's one other aspect of Europe's actual and potential capacity to be a major global power which should never be underestimated and that's a soft power the power to influence through example and attraction not economic or military might all the cultural and intellectual and lifestyle values that have made me a lifetime urofile as I described at the outset are equally attractive to vast numbers of people around the world again the genuine commitment of so many European countries if not unhappily these days all of them to humanitarian and human rights and international law values is a real contribution to their realization around the world and I don't think it goes unnoticed anywhere that Europe continues to be by far the world's most generous aid donor contributing 69% of global ODA as compared with just 21% for the United States far less for China a key reason the rest of the world needs Europe to go on firing and if possible even harder in this soft power space is that so few others are doing anything at all not just to make the world more prosperous or physically secure but more decent moving forward if Europe is to meet the challenges that I've described for the reasons why it should try that I've also described the question remains as to what needs to be done to make this happen what do European policymakers have to do more of or differently to see Europe becoming if not a fully co-equal power in a tripolar world alongside the United States and China at least more in that direction than that of becoming just another global also ran while it's totally presumptuous for a decayed former politician living on the other side of the world to offer any such prescriptions that can no doubt be said for all the other opinions I've offered in this lecture I nonetheless want to try to bring this lecture to a conclusion by making just these four final observations first recognize the absolute necessity of responsive effective political leadership at the moment that's invisibly short supply in Europe as in most of the rest of the world with the important exceptions I would certainly argue of Merkel and Macron and perhaps a small handful of others the quality of the continent's present leadership seems to me to range from the underwhelming to the desolate to the appalling publicless challenges to long established political parties happen because people are unhappy and there are invariably at least some good reasons for that unhappiness the first responsibility of political leaders anywhere is to listen and to understand then it's to devise communicate and implement effective policy responses maybe my aging is now turning to dementia but I can't help but believe that in focusing framing those responses there's still a huge amount to be said both in terms of substance and salability for the third way approach that the Hawke and Keating governments of the 1980s and 1990s initiated and successfully applied in Australia and which of course Tony Blair then successfully appropriated for the United Kingdom until we lost the plot over Iraq but that's another story that approach in short is a three-legged stool the first uncompromisingly dry productivity, competitiveness and free trade focused economic policy second uncompromisingly warm moist and compensatory social policy to ensure that no one is left behind by the dry stuff and the third uncompromisingly liberal internationalist foreign policy but maybe that the present mainstream parties are center left and center right are now so internally divided in so many European and other Western countries that such a program can only be delivered with a new configuration of the political landscape maybe such reconfiguration as it's increasingly being mooted will be around respectively those focusing favoring more open societies and who could I think coalesce around the kind of program approach that I've described and those who want their societies more closed if that happens so be it history doesn't stop when we get too old to write it ourselves second final observation about what Europe might do for itself it's critical if Europe is to play the leading global role it should could for its leaders to be absolutely serious about multilateralism and cooperative solutions to global and regional problems and the way that Donald Trump is again so spectacularly resisted the United Nations this week a great many of the major issues which this and future generations of politicians will have to face up to are what I mentioned before is Coffey Adams problems without passports those which by their very nature are beyond the capacity of any one state however great or powerful to individually solve they include not only achieving a clean and safe global environment but also world free of health pandemics out of control cross border population flows international trafficking drugs people extreme poverty and a world on its way to abolishing all weapons of mass destruction as itself a multilateral organization the EU is particularly well equipped not only to engage constructively itself on these issues but to encourage others to do so and that's reflected in the language of the 2016 EU global strategy moreover on the initiative of Germany and France there is being launched today today the 26th of September at the United Nations General Assembly an alliance for multilateralism described as a flexible and agile network of states ready to support initiatives for enhanced international cooperation build coalitions and consensus in a constructive and open spirit I have to say this appeals to me as having much more substantive and buy-in potential than the alliance for democracies project that has been around for some time particularly if this grouping can offer constructive solutions without taking sides on some of the issues on which the United States and China are presently mud-wrestling it's very much to be hoped that this initiative is Germany France initiative signals some inspired new commitment to global activism by the EU and is not just an inspired piece of PR fluff the latter is not unknown in EU diplomacy or indeed elsewhere third final observation if the EU is to have a more robust and effective role in the wider world it's probably time to recognize much more clearly than many so far have been prepared to certainly including French President Macron who overtly supports much closer integration overtly recognizing that it can only be as a two-speed entity with those few states who do want to proceed to something like a full federal state being allowed to follow that path but with others continuing to exercise within a common market structure a large measure of national sovereignty that wouldn't necessarily be my personal preference but it is the reality of Europe for the indefinitely foreseeable future and to ignore that reality might will be to encourage more Brexit's not a consummation to be devoutly wished fourth and finally to conclude where I came in it's crucially important if Europe is to meet the present array of challenges that presently beset it and not become a divided marginalized bit player on the world stage or even worse to become itself once again a theater for deadly conflict it's crucial that Europeans remember the past and that they remember or learn all over again if they can't remember why Robert Schumann set the whole European Union enterprise in train seven decades ago nobody now in office has any direct memory of World War Two and it's not long before a generation will be in power that has no direct memory of the Cold War either those Brexiteers and others who are intent on demolishing the EU and all that it stands for don't pause for one second to think how hard one has been the security democracy and standard of living they now enjoy as Ferdinand Mount put it in a piece of London review of books very recently they are the feckless children of 70 years of peace the feckless children of 70 years of peace may those feckless children never prevail may Robert Schumann's inspiration not just in Europe but on the wider global stage for as long into the future as we can possibly foresee have the impact and the influence that it deserves thank you thank you so much Chancellor that was a truly magisterial oration and demonstrates your depth of experience and acute understanding of Europe and global affairs we do have time friends for a little bit of Q and A so I have two of our interns here with microphones and I invite you now to have a discussion with our Chancellor we have time for probably a couple only so could you please before you ask your question introduce yourself as well so Natalie there there's one question on the left thank you Hello yes my name's Paul Leopardy I'm working here at ANU I have a specific question and that is how can Europe show leadership on the global environmental problems that we're currently facing? I think in a sense they're already doing so by joining with considerably more enthusiasm the number of other countries the Paris climate agreement I mean I think like everybody else it is just a matter of setting ambitious targets they're going far more than the distance than the comfortable economic ones to accept to taking a leadership role on renewables I have to say that the European resistance is now so complete outside France to nuclear power Scandinavia, Germany may not be all that fantastically smart in this context I know this is a fraught issue with a great many people and I know great many people do believe that hydrogen and wind and solar and so on can with new technology over time obviate the necessity for the kind of base load power that the nuclear can provide so even though I'm a passionate opponent of nuclear weapons I've always been a very strong advocate of the Atoms for Peace deal that lies behind the non-proliferation treaty and everything else and I've thought it troubling that the political momentum develops so quickly for getting rid of nuclear power completely or making it so impossibly difficult to establish new nuclear power stations so maybe that's one area where attitudes might change a little bit over time but on the whole I mean I think I haven't been following the climate debate as closely as I should have and I can't tell you precisely how the European Union as a whole individual countries have been holding up in terms of their commitments and their performance but my instinct is that this is an issue which is one where the Europeans have been very much operating at the necessary international pace I just hope they're prepared to be perhaps even a little bit more adventurous in the future Thank you very much for your presentation Rita Parker from the A&U Centre for European Studies You made the point that geography rather than history is the main game in the context of Europe the European Union being a global power Do you see the future where it may actually be formalized its position, its role within the United Nations as a geographic formal power and if so, where does that leave Australia which currently is part of one of five informal blocks the WIOG the Western Europe and other groups for the future Thank you Well by far the best way of Europe maximizing its effective potential in the United Nations context is by agreeing on a common EU seat with France and the UK seating their separate seats in favour of a larger entity I mean that is now an even more wistful dream I think than it's ever been but to have a combined European voice with that authority of the permanent seat in the Security Council and perhaps even God help us the veto power to go with it would be a fantastic demonstration of European's willingness to act collectively on all the great global issues of the day So the second part of the question was The second part of the question relates to Australia in the WIOG Yeah look it's always been a bit uncomfortable for Australia in WIOG we've never been comfortable in that particular environment because the Europeans particularly the EU acting as a collective has divvied up the spoils quite cheerfully among itself with only ever being prepared to offer the scraps to Australia and we've had to fight every one of our battles last time against Portugal to get a seat at the table A more logical home for us would of course be as part of the wider Asia bloc but getting a toe hold in that particular company is probably even more difficult for us than in WIOG and I can't really see obviously that happening I think there's so much else in the UN system we are as irrelevant as so many of these institutional arrangements are to the world of the 21st century as compared with that of the mid-last century the composition of the Security Council and so on I think we're stuck with it for the indefinitely foreseeable future and unless the whole system becomes so totally dysfunctional and breaks down so completely as to make it visibly irrelevant to everybody's concerns you know I think we're going to continue to stagger along as we have so far but you know the United Nations every now and again does something absolutely brilliant collectively at the Security Council lever and I'm just reading Samantha Power's book she's just published with a glorious title The Education of an Idealist and she's coming to speak to us here at ANU in November and she devotes a chapter to the UN's Security Council's response to the Ebola crisis in Africa which was a stunningly effective collective response to not just a regional but a global problem so every now and again you know the UN rises above its manifest limitations and demonstrates what might have been and I think it's just incredibly important that the EU collectively continue to be a strong supporter of it particularly when the multilateral systems under so much obvious challenge from the United States Take a question from over here up the back Michael Keating Editor-in-Chief of Inside Canberra Chancellor, you spoke about the Sino-Angler-Fear relations of course our Prime Minister is currently a guest of the President of the United States in the United States, Donald Trump and he's made a point that China hasn't invited him to have a similar arrangement Do you think that we and you mentioned the Cold War that most people wouldn't remember but do you think we are already in the next Cold War between China and the United States through cyber security and other means and do you think Europe will be dragged into that? It really takes me back to my Prime Minister days where the question bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the speech I've just made Nothing about Europe in that other than I suppose Europe's role in a new Cold War Look, Australian Prime Ministers have got to do what they've got to do I'm not critical of Scott Morrison for the way in which he's handled a visit and played to the ego of Trump and steered a course I think he's been pretty reasonable in the way in which he's made it clear that we're not going to be party to any new Iran adventure War in the Middle East and he did by himself some wiggle room in the context of Australia's interests with China being very very different from those of the United States and we had to pursue our own interests in that respect But to, you know, dress it up in all the panoply and perseflage of love and affection of the alliance relationship I mean, tacky as at all was, was entirely understandable and I'm afraid if we were in government we'd be taking a very deep breath and doing exactly the same ourselves I don't want to overdo the dangers of plunging into a new Cold War I think a lot of that language is overwrought but the, unless there's a pretty quick solution pretty soon to the solution pretty soon to the trade war which I think is manifestly both in the United States and China's interest to achieve You know, we are headed into a bit of a spiral mode which is really quite worrying for all of us and certainly worrying for Europe just as much as us here in Australia Thank you Chancellor I think there was a question up the back Thank you Thank you Chancellor Michael from the ANU My question was in relation to your quite scathing comments about those who voted for the EU Speaking to my very common UK family they seem to think that the EU is largely a vehicle for grossly exacerbating inequality while promoting the economic interests of the elite they tend to take from the vast majority of the population sorry take largely from the vast majority of the population Do you think greater promoting greater equality economic equality across both Europe, the US and other countries might stop some of these populism economics and might stop angering international institutions that make these trade rules in the interests of the elite Thank you I think the question was about EU I think infrastructure is extends to my hearing these days It's not egalitarian or more elitist It's about the impact of economic inequality in the present political discontents in Europe and elsewhere Yeah look I think this is a very serious issue and it's where you know where political leaders have simply not been listening hard enough to what their constituencies have been telling them in all our countries and it's what I said before I mean populism arises because people are unhappy and they get unhappy when they believe they're not being listened to they believe they get unhappy when they see gaps opening up they certainly get unhappy parents get unhappy when they see their kids facing less prospective futures than they do themselves so I mean addressing those issues addressing them very very seriously is a central policy obligation of all of us and certainly I think the you know the major parties the centre left and centre right have to get their heads around the necessity to squarely address that You don't have to be completely soft headed about the way in which you go about it as arguably you know Jeremy Corbyn is in the United Kingdom at the moment I think you can do what we did in Australia with that very tough rigorous competitive productivity job generating approach to economic management provided that you accompany it with the compensatory measures to ensure that nobody really is left behind and that's been the weakness of so much of the policy delivery around the place people have sort of lurched from one side of that to the other without getting the balance absolutely right maybe I'm just being nostalgic for a bygone age I do think if you can find strategies to deliver on that in all our countries will be a better place I mean that's situation within individual countries is obviously the larger inequality issues within Europe that I described before the central and eastern Europe country is still lagging behind the south still lagging behind a bit not in every case and that in turn you know creates precipitous tendencies within the within the union which everybody is aware of and policy makers are trying hard to address at the moment Thank you and we've got a final question for a gentleman over here Thank you Good evening Jonathan's my name I'm a school teacher from a place called Queenbyan My question to you chancellor is it's taking you up on the third point you are making about national sovereignty and political autonomy for members of the EU Recently on a speaking to in Australia a journalist an author by the name of I think it's Simon Leffer was arguing that the EU in his opinion was in decline whilst he felt that the economic integration was a good thing he was arguing that there had been a a large degree of overreach with regards to political integration and he was asserting that if you could achieve an unbiased survey of some countries in the EU and he referred to France in particular that you would find that people were of a mind to leave so can you address that question of political autonomy and sovereignty in the context of the EU please I wasn't suggesting that it should be a sovereignty open slather with everybody doing their own thing with only the loosest possible sort of common market thing holding them together what I was suggesting was as many many people said this is hardly original that we just got to come to terms with the reality of a two-speed EU with a core group of countries and it's really pretty small just around France who really are pretty keen on the whole idea at least at the governmental level maybe that's not shared by their population are they an integrated really genuine united Europe making common decisions on all sorts of things and the reality that outside that there's an awful lot of countries that are just not prepared you know to go down that particular path unfortunately you know so much of the the rhetoric has been the inexorable move towards greater and greater integration and that's the rhetoric that's been heard by the Brexiteers in in Britain where it's falls on particularly unresponsive years for familiar historical cultural reasons I mean Britain's always been a bit of a reluctant you know entrant into the EU and you need to be recognise that reality so no I mean don't overdo the sovereignty argument but recognise the reality that you know Emmanuel Macron's particular dream is not remotely feasible for the indefinitely foreseeable future and would be pretty helpful if he stopped talking about it accordingly Well said thank you so much Chancellor would you have a seat and I will now invite the ambassador from the European Union to Australia Dr Michael Poulch to come up and give the vote of thanks first Good evening everyone let me start by saying this thank you thank you Professor Evans for your engaging lecture on Europe's future it is indeed a privilege to listen to an imminent Australian speaker discuss Europe from such an intimate and informed position and it is a humbling experience to be given the floor to show to close such a rich and stimulating this debate tonight we have been invited to a Schumann lecture in the true sense of its meaning a sharp analysis of the current challenges based on a deep understanding of the historical and political context and coupled with a vision for future direction there is much to be reflected on luckily luckily we have a reception afterwards to allow more conversation on the many issues raised today I would like to offer just three points by way of closing remarks Europe indeed is at a crossroads in many ways Europe has been at crossroads at times before and Professor Evans raised some of the recent ones integrating the other half of the continent and the financial crisis for instance I expect many more to come in the future the European Union has just demonstrated in the past however that it can be dynamic and evolving and this adaptability has enabled us to weather many of storms but no doubt the combination of Brexit a key member to leave a reorientation of our transatlantic partnership the pillar of European's development of 60 years a rising and assertive China together with a more difficult relationship with Russia creates a particular demanding geopolitical environment one ray of optimism here after the brexit referendum support for Europe has risen in all member states in all member states the EU has woken up to the need to do more about its own strategic sovereignty and it has reassessed the balance of its interest and concerns with China at the last bilateral summit in April this is and these are first steps to address the basic requirements that Professor Evans has noted for the EU to fully use its potential this brings me to my second point that Professor Evans has alluded to Europe's challenges in many ways also reflect challenges that the entire world is facing as we are about to lose the comfort predictability and stability of a globalized world based on accepted rules norms and standards of behavior this incidentally has brought Australia and the EU closer together than probably ever before support of the international rules based trading system is one of the key elements that motivated both sides to pursue FDA negotiations Europe is increasingly seen as perhaps the champion of multilateralism or the one that is left tonight at the UN as Professor Evans mentioned in New York a new alliance for multilateralism an initiative by France and Germany will be launched by their foreign ministers this could well be one of the steps to respond to Professor Evans call for a Europe that punches at its global weight Avoir as one says in the couloirs of the Berlin home building my last point is this the four issues that Professor Evans raised in his conclusions are an excellent advice for an incoming new European leadership now I had the privilege of listening to all new leaders two weeks ago at our ambassadors conference in Brussels my impression is that that this message is coming through President-elect von der Leyen has started her presentation by saying she was born and grew up in Brussels she knows where we come from and she outlined three key avenues for the EU to advance during her job a new green deal strategic autonomy and digitalization and ensuring the EU as a security provider including a stronger EU foreign and security dimension Charles Michel the current Prime Minister of Belgium who will replace Donald Tusk as President of European Council provided a tour d'horizon of the current geopolitical environment that requires a united a united Europe and this is very much in line with the analysis we heard tonight we also have a new president of the European Parliament David Sasouli who understands that Europe constantly needs to win the hearts and minds of its citizens now and for an EU ambassador to Canberra here was the good news President von der Leyen specifically mentioned Australia relations and the FDA and her remarks on this happy note I would like to thank Professor Evans for his thought-provoking Schumann lecture 2019 this lecture serves as a reminder to all of us of what was behind the European project beyond difference and boundaries there lies a common interest I find it quite refreshing to have an intellectual debate on European matters here at ANU in the centre of policy debate in Australia many thanks and new for drinks thank you thank you so much Ambassador Polch well friends, we have had many wonderful Schumann lectures in this hall over many years and it's great to see so many familiar faces joining us again tonight but I'm sure you will agree that of all the many Schumanns that we've had this has probably been one of the highlights and one of the most incisive orations so please join me in thanking Professor Gareth Evans the Chancellor of the Australian National University