Globalisation, which benefits only multi-national companies and takes away all sense of local or national pride and identity, is the biggest threat facing all the member states of the EU.
I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.
The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.
Financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation are helping each other out. Those two ideologies want to bring France to its knees.
Incidentally, I don't think there is a non-adjectival 'globalisation'. What we have now is a particular form: dominated by finance and multinational corporations and by a rhetoric (though not a reality) of 'free trade' and market forces. So I'm not a localist. I'm an internationalist, but one who believes (a) that such a thing is really only possible through a prior grounding and (b) that the terms of our present globalisation have to be challenged politically.
I gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and warned of Trump. America has survived for almost 250 years with its imperfect democracy, but, you know, maybe it's a better democracy than elsewhere. And I am sure American democracy will survive.
Globalisation can provide the route for the development of a sustainable and prosperous planetary society in the next generation, provided that globalisation itself becomes more civilised than it is right now.
Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.
We think about democracy, and that's the word that Americans love to use, 'democracy,' and that's how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it's pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense.
We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.
People say that globalisation has negative aspects, but I don't believe globalisation is bad. It's criticised from a western perspective, but if you put yourself in the shoes of people in the developing world, it provides an unprecedented opportunity.
We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its State, its national conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on.
In establishing democracy, we have to be sensitive to the regional and national context. Democracy also means to guarantee the rights of the minorities. That's my job as a king. We have for example a Jewish ambassador in the US and a Christian in the UK.
Well, that's the way democracy works. We have to build this Europe with the material we have at our disposal. And this material is national democracy.
The rules may seem obvious but when you think about them they're not. For somebody who has my job they're not as obvious as one would think.
We need to change our mindset and understand that the protection of our democracy is a national security issue. When any country interferes with your democracy, they are attacking you.