and fellow lawmaker Karl Lamers in 1994 urged the European Union to adopt a policy they called "variable geometry" under which five countries most committed to integration – Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg – would proceed swiftly toward monetary union, joint foreign and defense policies and other forms of integration. In 2014, both reiterated their ideas in an op-ed for the Financial Times, renewing their call for a core group of European Union countries to move ahead faster with economic and political integration. Countries such as Britain should put forward proposals for returning some competences to national governments, they said, while "the EU should focus mainly on the following areas: a fair and open internal market; trade; currency and financial markets; climate, environment and energy; and foreign and security policy." Also, they proposed the establishment of a European budget commissioner with powers to reject national budgets if they do not correspond to the jointly agreed rules and a "eurozone parliament" comprising the MEPs of eurozone countries to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of decisions affecting the single currency bloc. On 21 November 2011 Schäuble said the euro would emerge stronger from the current crisis, and ultimately all non-members would be convinced to sign up. He said Great Britain would eventually join the euro (but that he respected Britain's decision to keep the pound). On a British exit from the EU, Schäuble argued in 2014 that Britain's EU membership was particularly important for Germany as both countries share a market-oriented reform approach in many economic and regulatory questions. In 2015, then-Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis of Greece called Schäuble "the intellectual force behind the project of European Monetary Union". In 2015, Schäuble raised the idea of stripping the European Commission of regulatory powers, expressing concern over its neutrality and willingness to fulfil its role as "guardian of the treaties", in particular with regard to the enforcement of rules on budget discipline; unnamed diplomats were cited by Reuters as stating that this was not incompatible with his reputation as "a veteran pro-European who has long favored turning the Commission over time into a European 'government. Following the Brexit in 2016, Schäuble urged Member States to be more pragmatic and take an intergovernmental approach to solving problems. Foreign policy Schäuble is considered a "committed transatlanticist". On 7 June 2011, he was among the guests invited to the state dinner hosted by President Barack