The world is opening up with freer travel, common mass media, open communication systems. Free trade is a vital part of this movement. It may be regional for now, but it all strengthens the move to wider free trade - as long as we keep these trading areas open to the rest of the world, as the EU is and must remain. So the question now is not so much whether there should be free trade, but how best to manage what I believe is an irreversible and irresistible trend so that all countries and all peoples can benefit. Everywhere, on all fronts of human existence, all people face the challenge of change.
Technology transforms their workplaces.
Globalization alters the structures in which they work. Financial markets that with the push of a button move sums of money beyond contemplation across international frontiers with stunning rapidity, can move whole economies. These are powerful impulses of economic change that leave people feeling powerless and insecure about their future. And in the wake of economic change, social change. Communities disintegrating, families destabilized, crime and drugs and social exclusion.