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The intensity of what Donald Trump has done in the US was really unexpected, and its consequences are very broad – it’s not just confined to one field or another. At the same time, this is happening at a time when the European Union (EU) is ready to take a different approach to some issues of integration and competitiveness. So I think it's an interesting moment.

We are on the edge, I think. The EU has always had these two levels: the European level and the national level. Jacques Delors famously said that the European Union was a “federation of nation states.” That seems true to me – for the simple reason that all these European countries have hundreds of years of history and different languages and cultures.

These national differences will stay, but over the last 10 years,

we’ve come to understand that the individual EU member countries are too small to be competitive

with China and India – or even with Indonesia, Nigeria and Brazil. We need to be more integrated to be competitive. Now, we will see if we can overcome some nationalistic approaches to be more competitive: not for ideological reasons, but just to repatriate jobs and capital that we are giving to other countries because of our fragmentation. It’s all about competitiveness.

In that crucial moment of crisis, we had 10 or 11 selfish nationalistic approaches, rather than generous long-term approaches. We are still paying the price for that today. That is because we have an approach to financial systems, to savings and to the world of finance in general that is very much influenced by that period and the idea that public is better than private.

In Europe, we have always had this idea that finance is close to the devil. There's a link.

The financial crisis was badly managed, and some of the consequences are still with us today.

The fact that we don't have the banking union finally integrated is also a legacy of the financial crisis. 15 years on, we are still at the same point. In my view, this is the real problem with the EU. We weren't able to take the right decisions at that time. And we are still paying for it. And we’re also paying the price of the very slow growth we have had in the last 10 years and of Brexit. That was, in my view, one of the worst decisions ever. And the slow growth of Europe stands at the opposite extreme to the very fast growth that the US had as it exited from the financial crisis.

A savings and investments union. Why? Because it is a new project that gives us the possibility of repatriating capital and jobs through the integration of the European financial markets. And that can lead to the completion of the banking union. If we start with the banking union, we are still stuck with the problem of mutual trust. I have to say that the banking union in this period is mostly a German-Italian match, given the Commerzbank/UniCredit situation. In a moment in which there is a discussion between two banks, an Italian bank and a German bank, I don't think that we will make progress on the banking union any time soon.

On the other hand, I think we can move forward on the savings and investment union and that can bring some solutions for the banking union.

First, there is the completion of the banking union. We lost a great opportunity to get that done, and I think it was a big mistake.

The second thing was the opportunity to have a well-performing, well-organized, stigma-free European Stability Mechanism (ESM). For 10 years, we have had the ESM there in Luxembourg. But there has always been a political problem around it. Indeed, in my report, I proposed using the ESM for defense expenditures. It is urgent, and it is an emergency.

We need to find the money, and there is this tool that is not being used.

Why don't we use the ESM? But I don’t see countries running to take up this proposal.

So those are the two big things for me, and then there is also the fact that we are still bashing securitization. The public mood hasn’t really moved on from that. But the southern countries that were worst affected by the crisis are performing better in Europe today. That is a demonstration that some solutions do work.

The main point here is that the fragmentation of the single market is a big minus for European countries and for European citizens, savers, entrepreneurs and workers. We have the euro, and it was a great achievement, but the reality of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is that we were successful with the M but not with the E.

This is crucial. We didn’t achieve a successful economic union because we went with monetary union first and it was such an effort to get there. We convinced the Germans, we swayed public opinion and then we left the rest without integration. The core of my report is an alarm that says, “Hey, people – we have the same currency. But we have 27 financial markets, 20 energy markets and 27 telecoms markets.”

We don’t take advantage of having the same currency, and we are losing ground because of this fragmentation. And that fragmentation is more relevant today because the world has changed. When we decided not to proceed with the rest of the economic integration, the world was totally different. China wasn't there. India wasn't there. The BRICS didn't exist. The US was totally different. So the competitive strength of single European member states was completely different.

I always use the example of my own country, Italy. We used to have 60 million people, and we still have 60 million people today. In the past, Italy was as big as China and India combined in economic terms. Today, the Chinese and Indian economies together are 20 times those of Italy. And they have almost 2.9 billion people between them. But in terms of strength, in terms of power, it's absolutely astonishing the difference that 20 years has made.

On their own, European countries are too small. This is the point.

I usually say that the EU member states divide into two groups: the small countries and the countries that don’t know they are small.

That’s the key to understanding what’s happening in Europe. There are countries that were big countries in the past and still think they are big today. I put Italy in this group. But, in reality, we are small countries in comparison with China, India, the BRICS and the US. So we have to integrate. This is the big change, and I hope my report has increased awareness of this consideration.

One of the chapters in my report is on simplification. While preparing the report, I heard so many voices from Ireland to Finland to Portugal to Greece to Romania asking for simplification – most notably from companies, of course. And I think when we talk about simplification, we have to be very clear about what we mean.

For that reason, I added a very concrete proposal to the report, which I see as a game changer. This is the idea of the 28th virtual state.

What does that mean? The most complicated part of our legal framework is the fact that we have 27 implementations at the national level of the different directives and rules at the European level, because we have 27 different legal systems. Take Spain, for example. The country is divided into the 17 Comunidades Autónomas, each with its own business law. That’s clearly a great obstacle for investors from abroad, but it's also a great obstacle for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

I vividly remember a meeting with SMEs in Bilbao, where someone told me that SMEs need passports too – because, if they don’t, they will never take advantage of the single market. If an SME needs to have 10 lawyers to work out the difference between Spain and Portugal or between Croatia and Germany, it is impossible. An SME can't have 10 lawyers.

So SMEs are not benefiting from the single market.

As you know very well, SMEs make up 90% or more of the European economy. So my proposal is to create a 28th virtual state with its own business law. The European Commission has taken my proposal and is using it for start-ups. It's a good idea, I think. For other companies, there’s the idea of creating a sort of fast track. So that’s simplification: that’s the way we stop fragmentation and work on the level playing field that is the most simplified system.