[FR] Global economy prize 2006 – University of Kiel

I am extremely honoured by the decision of the Global Economy Prize Committee to award me this distinction. I would like to express my gratitude and thanks to the Kiel Institute.

It is an invitation to look back on a chapter in the history of European integration, not to praise it, but to draw some lessons for the present and the future. The current mood is to focus only on the present moment, forgetting the path we have travelled, the progress we have made, but also the failures and mistakes. Yet peoples without memory cannot imagine or build a future.

In doing so, I do not intend to gloss over the difficulties of the present or underestimate the serious crisis affecting the process of European unification.