WASHINGTON -- Italy's reformist new premier said Thursday that surviving the financial crisis is making Europe stronger by forcing it to confront some of its structural problems and predicted the European Union would admit new members.

Proposed policies that languished for years in Brussels are now moving forward rapidly, and the group of nations is showing greater coordination on budgetary policies, he said.

"The EU was not constructed to manage crises ... And I believe we have seen an update to this machinery," Monti said during an address at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, ahead of a meeting with President Barack Obama.

Monti said that he envisioned that the EU will grow over the next few years.

"I would imagine a euro area that has a composition that is larger than the current one" Monti said. "I don't see countries leaving, I see countries coming in," he said.

This was Monti's first visit to Washington since he was named in November to replace Silvio

Berlusconi and fix Italy's debt crisis. The economics professor and former EU competition commissioner immediately enacted stiff austerity measures and pushed through reforms overturning decades of rules that have kept large portions of the Italian economy in the hands of insiders, stifled competition and hampered the young.

Monti has said all Italians must make sacrifices, and has renounced his own salary as premier and economy minister. But he faces a tough battle as taxi drivers, pharmacists, truck drivers and others from sectors he is seeking to liberalize have staged angry strikes. Italy's small business lobbies have stifled the country's economy by blocking competition, keeping work hours short and perpetuating inefficiencies in business practices.

In an acknowledgment of what he has accomplished and of the steep challenges that lie before him, Monti was introduced warmly as "Super Mario!" by C. Fred Bergsten, the institute's director.

Monti said Italians have been receptive and ready for change, and pointed to the brevity of the strikes as an example of the "maturity of the Italian people."

"It's not that they resist being governed," the premier said. "They have a pent up desire for government."

Monti welcomed Greece's tentative agreement earlier Thursday on new austerity cuts, and noted that the crisis in Athens "posed the most severe and extreme case one might imagine for the eurozone."

Greece's new austerity plan would make deep cuts to wages and public-sector jobs in exchange for a crucial euro130 billion bailout.