The
future of Europe: new groups, divisions and fault lines
From
integrationists calling for a European federation to populists
arguing for mass exit, who’s who in the debate on the EU’s
future?
Patrick Wintour
Saturday 23 July
2016 00.04 BST
In the debate on the
future of Europe – too often boiled down to more or less Europe –
new divisions, groups and fault lines are likely to emerge that will
reveal differences not just between countries but within countries
and between ideologies, too.
Integrationists
The German finance
minister Wolfgang Schäuble has probably made the strongest case for
more central control over national budgets – but does so on his
terms, of rigid fiscal discipline to stabilise the euro.
Figures such as the
former prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt call for a strong
European federation to replace the “weak, incapacitated
confederation of member states we have today”. Rules on unanimity
“mean we move forward at the pace of the slowest member state and
drag ourselves from standstill to standstill”, Verhofstadt has
said. He wants a Europe with a united defence force, a common foreign
policy, a small but powerful European government and a fully fledged
European treasury with its own resources (instead of the current
European budget of 1% of GDP funded by national contributions ). The
Common European Army has support in Germany.
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German chancellor
Angela Merkel has ruled out transformation through treaty change,
saying instead that the EU needs to streamline, cut red tape and
create jobs. “The objective has to be to convince citizens why we
do certain things,” she has said. “The issue is not about more or
less regulation, but to set objectives more precisely.”
Merkel is joined by
the Netherlands prime minister Mark Rutte, who said: “This is not a
time to resort to extremist thinking or to get bogged down in
ideological discussions about a superstate versus nation states.”
Instead, he advocates the nation state where possible and Europe
where necessary. “Our focus should be on practical cooperation that
will lead to a stronger and better Europe,” he added.
The German SPD
leader Sigmar Gabriel last week called for a slimming down of EU
payments to agriculture and a more focused commission. A European
commission in which 27 commissioners want to prove themselves makes
no sense.
Expansionists
Leading figures are
Italy, Spain, French Socialists, Greece and Portugal, who want less
restrictive EU borrowing rules and greater flexibility to prop up
their banks. “More growth and more investment, less austerity and
less bureaucracy, this is the line we have proposed for two years, at
the beginning in isolation,” Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi
said. The expansionists claim lack of economic growth is killing
Europe. France’s economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, probably has
the most developed expansionist plan for a new way of administering
the euro area.
Sceptics
The more Eurosceptic
Visegrád countries – Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech
Republic – are the most organised bloc. “We have to return to the
thesis that the member states and not EU institutions form the basis
of the EU. The democratic features of the EU can only be strengthened
through member states,” Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán,
said last Wednesday.
“The EU is not in
Brussels, but in the 27 capitals,” Orbán said. He added that prior
efforts to create democratic legitimacy for the EU institutions had
failed, and called for the European parliament to include nationally
elected politicians.
Populists
This group includes
several populist Eurosceptic parties, including the far-right Front
National (FN) in France and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD), as well as figures associated with Italy’s 5 Star Movement.
To varying degrees, these parties favour a mass EU exit.
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