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.

Europe was founded as a community bound together by solidarity.

Solidarity is the fundamental idea of European cooperation. If a country feels itself to be militarily threatened and calls for soldiers, weapons and sanctions, then that's what it gets. When governments say they need money from the structural funds to stabilize their economy, that's what they get. But you can't cherry pick solidarity.

For many people, politics in Brussels and Strasbourg might as well be happening on another planet.

At the end of the day, men like Donald Trump need to be given that which they themselves dispense: clear messages. I would confront him as clearly and explicitly as possible. It is not only the right, but also the duty, of the leader of a German government to do that.

The stubborn stance of some European governments on the refugee question is a reprisal less aimed at Angela Merkel or (Vice Chancellor) Sigmar Gabriel than at certain people on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin.

We agree: Brussels can't regulate everything. I'm driven by something else: There are forces in Europe that want to generally give national policy priority over a common European approach. We have to prevent this.