[…] The faith in Europe weakened, particularly in my country, particularly in your country. But what inspired us, my generation is no longer true. We have to take back this challenge and offer new visions, to young people, and create this old and new perspective on Europe. (…) The Germans and the French, the German soldiers and the French soldiers, are not used to work together, they were used to fight against each other. During centuries and centuries. And when I was in charge of Kosovo, a German general came. We were the same age, and so we came together, we worked together, we did not decide anything without the other. And in that time we discovered that for our parents it would have been impossible to just look at our common decision, destiny and work together. (…) Thank you for the German army to work with our French army and other nations in Congo. Thank you, for being together in Lebanon.
[…] The way the media use to cover a situation is sometimes too much, sometimes not enough. The people there they don’t even know, and they didn’t know before what’s on one side of the border or on the other side (…) They didn’t know, who founded the Israeli state and why. And on the other side, just five meters ahead, they didn’t know, what Hezbollah represents for the people of the Southern Lebanon. (…) It was absolutely difficult to explain, what was the concept of human rights. It was not accepted by all the countries. Step after step, year after year, we succeeded. Human dignity, human rights are more or less internationally accepted. More or less. Globalisation is a threat for a lot of people. And partly my people, the French, they voted against the constitutional treaty, because they were frightened by the perspective of globalisation. They didn’t understand that Europe was, let’s say, the instrument, the opportunity, to get a better globalisation.
[…] And in one particular field there is a real progress: in the area of health. We are now all together fighting Aids. And tomorrow, we will fight poverty, which is the main threat of the world. And now we are giving money through the fund, global fund. People are giving one Euro or one thousand Euros to take care of the situation, to help somebody else, very far away, somebody they don’t know. This is progress. (…) And so thank you because we are on the way from “Doctors without Borders” to “Patients without Borders”.
Thank you very much.