Germany is not a fair country. Millions of people believe that things aren't fair in this country. Company profits and bonus payments have increased at the same rate as precarious employment situations.

We are in the middle of a tough, ideological conflict that is being waged across the entire continent. On the one side are those who say that global challenges like migration and terror cannot be met with national parochialism. On the other side are those who would like to see a renaissance of the nation-state.

We Germans are particularly aware that you can only be successful on the global market over the long term if you offer energy-efficient products that are, by nature, climate-friendly.

I am critical of the fact that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is pulling out of everything - the joint approach to the refugee issue, for example. He cannot disparage his colleagues in the EU either - that's not how we treat each other. We require solidarity: in refugee policies, just as in the financial architecture of the structural funds from which countries like Hungary have strongly profited from for years.

European policy is always an interplay of rationality and emotion.

We're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.

I'm fully aware that my vision of a European bicameral parliament can't be implemented tomorrow. I'm also not an integration fanatic.