What governments and people don't realise is that sometimes the collective interest - the international interest - is also the national interest.

Unfortunately, very few governments think about youth unemployment when they are drawing up their national plans.

We pay a price when special interests win out over the collective national interest.

I wanted to put the national interest before my personal interests.

National markets are held together by shared values and confidence in certain minimum standards. But in the new global market, people do not yet have that confidence.

My belief is that the nation-state remains the one entity that can function, the one entity that can demand sacrifice from its constituents in the national interest.