The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.

My objective is that before the end of the millennium Europe should have a true federation. The Commission should become a political executive which can define essential common interests... responsible before the European Parliament and before the nation-states represented how you will, by the European Council or by a second chamber of national parliaments.

If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more.

The European model is, first, a social and economic system founded on the role of the market, for no computer in the world can process information better than the market.

Cinema explains American society. It's like a Western, with good guys and bad guys, where the weak don't have a place.

I would not be opposed to devising a new system of pensions, in which one part was based on collective provision, but which also gave incentives for people to take out an additional, personal plan.

Any union that can't accept workers choosing their own representatives through universal franchise is finished.