If Britain long felt like a sore festering at the heart of European unity, its planned departure has made one thing clear – it’s far from the only malaise for the vision of a common European Union future.
After the June referendum vote in Britain to quit the EU, it should have felt for many of the other member states like a brake was released and they were free to move forward with their joint venture. Instead, 28-minus-1 leaders will be meeting at the centuries-old Bratislava Castle on Friday with one question on their minds – how to keep everybody else moving, and if not in lockstep then more or less in the same direction?
“It would be a fatal error to assume that the negative result in the U.K. referendum represents a specifically British issue,” EU Council President Donald Tusk wrote to the 27 leaders ahead of the summit.
“We must be lucid on Europe’s situation,” French President Francois Hollande said on Thursday following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris. “It’s not just another crisis, it might be an existential crisis” for the EU.
Losing a member for the first time – a financial powerhouse at that – would be difficult to swallow at the best of times. But Brexit comes on top of a refugee emergency that EU nations simply cannot agree how to manage. Countries in the east – Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and others – have openly opposed proposed solutions coming out of Brussels and even defied the wishes of their neighbors.
Economic woes weigh heavily too. Greece’s place in the euro single currency has been called into question, and created a major rift between pro-austerity countries led by Germany and countries with more social-minded governments. Spain and Portugal face the threat of fines for failing to bring their budgets into line while France has avoided penalties, creating more strains.
Meanwhile extremist attacks in Paris, Brussels and Germany combined with the lack of intelligence-sharing between member countries have fueled the fears of citizens for their safety and undermined confidence that the EU can provide a solution.
It’s all been fodder for the far-right. Only on Wednesday French far-right leader Marine Le Pen promised a referendum on France’s place in the EU should she seize the presidency next year.
Against this backdrop, Tusk is hoping for an “honest assessment” of how the EU got itself into this fundamental political quagmire where distrust has replaced half a century of optimism as the EU expanded from a core of a half-dozen west European neighbors to a wealthy group of 28 nations making up the world’s largest trading bloc.
As he chairs the summit, Tusk will be counting on frank, even blunt exchanges. Increasingly, politeness has gone out the window as one crisis has been heaped onto the next.
“We must rectify a number of things in order to preserve what is best,” Tusk wrote.