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The EU cannot survive if it sticks to business as usual
The EU cannot survive if it sticks to business as usual
Allowing EU member states to move in different directions and at different speeds is precisely the wrong way to address the differing concerns of Europeans living in different countries - and it seems an odd way to unite them behind a single way forward for the continent.
As British Prime Minister Theresa May triggers Article 50, rendering Brexit inescapable, Europe is gripped by two paradoxes, both of which pose clear and present threats to the European Union and to Britain.
David Cameron – May's predecessor who lost the Brexit referendum – has reason to be puzzled by the upshot of his defeat. Britain is now leaving the EU because of his request for a "variable geometry" – allowing Britain to opt out of basic EU tenets – which was unceremoniously turned down by Berlin and, less consequentially, by Paris.
Yet, as a direct result of Brexit, Berlin and Paris are now adopting the idea of variable geometry as the way forward for the EU. This first paradox is easier to understand when seen through the lens of the conventional European practice of making a virtue out of failure.
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, had for years opposed the idea of a Europe that proceeds at different speeds – allowing some countries to be less integrated than others, due to their domestic political situation. But now – after the colossal economic mismanagement of the euro crisis has weakened the EU's legitimacy, given Eurosceptics a major impetus, and caused the EU to shift to an advanced stage of disintegration – Mrs Merkel and her fellow EU leaders seem to think that a multi-speed Europe is essential to keeping the bloc together.
At the weekend, as EU leaders gathered to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, leaders of the remaining 27 member states signed the Rome Declaration, which says that they will "act together, at different paces and intensity where necessary, while moving in the same direction, as we have done in the past."
The failure to keep the EU together along a single path toward common values, a common market and a common currency will come to be embraced and rebranded as a new start, leading to a Europe in which a coalition of the willing will proceed with the original ambition while the rest form outer circles, connected to the inner core by unspecified bonds.
In principle, such a manifold EU will allow for the East's self-proclaimed illiberal democracies to remain in the single market, refusing to relocate a single refugee or to adhere to standards of press freedom and judicial independence that other European countries consider essential.
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