The
two-presidents Europe
Jean-Claude
Juncker and Donald Tusk have competing visions for Europe.
By
Florian Eder
9/14/16, 6:02 PM CET
STRASBOURG —
Jean-Claude Juncker’s Europe is different from Donald Tusk’s
Europe.
Tusk, the European
Council president, believes the EU needs time to lick its wounds and
should shift power back from Brussels to national capitals. Juncker,
who runs the European Commission, trusts in the power of EU
legislation to nudge countries toward common ground.
Those contrasting
views were brought into even sharper relief this week in the build-up
to a summit Friday on the future of a post-Brexit EU, as both
presidents offered visions of how Europe can get out of its state of
perma-crisis. Juncker’s forum was his annual State of the Union
address Wednesday to the European Parliament; Tusk’s was more
subtle, in a letter he sent to EU national leaders Tuesday and then
released publicly as his “personal reflections.”
Describing the EU in
his message to leaders, Tusk referred ominously to a continent on the
edge of collapse, a place where political elites struggle with
“restoring control over events and processes which overwhelm,
disorientate, and sometimes terrify” people.
Tusk also described
a continent in need of more security and stronger border protections,
and less “politically correct statements that Europe cannot become
a fortress.” His message ahead of the Friday summit in Bratislava
was an attempt to accommodate Eastern European criticism of current
EU refugee policies, which have been pushed by Germany and by
Juncker’s Commission.
EU leaders, in
Tusk’s view, should prevent both “last year’s chaos on our
borders” and “new images every day of hundreds of thousands of
people moving across our continent without any control” — echoing
the language of Brexiteers who described chaos on the Continent and
the importance of “taking back control.”
Tusk also made it
clear who should be taking back that control: national capitals. He
wrote that “giving new powers to European institutions is not the
desired recipe. National electorates want more influence on the
decisions of the Union.”
In other words, the
EU needs to learn a lesson from Brexit.
That’s a view
shared by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Polish
government. The two countries, together with the two other members of
the Visegrád group, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, will offer
their own vision of Europe’s future on Friday, two diplomatic
sources said. The proposal will call for a key role for national
governments and parliaments in EU decision-making.
But not all EU
governments were thrilled with Tusk’s message.
European
Commission's President Jean-Claude Juncker arrives to make his State
of the Union speech: but how did he fare?
“Many had wished
for a more positive agenda,” said one government official who took
part in a meeting of EU diplomats Monday. The official said he was
surprised to see that Tusk’s lines “barely changed” between
Monday and Tuesday night, when his letter was made public.
Think positive
While acknowledging
the “existential crisis” facing Europe, Juncker made a special
effort Wednesday to put forward a “positive” agenda. He offered a
list of legislative proposals he thinks leaders can rally behind at a
time, he said, when Brexit looms and there is “so little
commonality in our Union.”
“It is as if
there is almost no intersection between the EU and its national
capitals anymore” — Jean-Claude Juncker
In one sense he
agreed with Tusk on the EU diagnosis: Brexit is bad, Europe is in a
deep crisis. “It is as if there is almost no intersection between
the EU and its national capitals anymore,” Juncker told MEPs.
But the Commission
president offered a different cure.
“Do we give in to
a very natural feeling of frustration?” he asked. “Do we allow
ourselves to become collectively depressed? Do we want to let our
Union unravel before our eyes? Or do we say: Is this not the time to
pull ourselves together?”
Both Tusk and
Juncker claim to have taken Europe’s pulse in recent weeks,
speaking to representatives from every EU country in an effort to
find areas of common ground. Juncker said he found “fragmentation,”
and listed only a few policy areas on which a large majority of
countries could agree: cooperation on defense, security and the fight
against terrorism, and the EU’s single market. The focus, he said,
should be on things once seen as an EU strength but now controversial
in voters’ eyes, such as trade policy.
Juncker was not
afraid to challenge national leaders with his speech, urging them
back to the table to make them work on what he thinks Europeans want:
“Common decisions followed by swift and efficient implementation.”
He also challenged
his presidential counterpart, by proposing that leaders at the
Bratislava meeting Tusk will chair come up with “three reasons why
we need the EU.”
But Juncker has no
illusions about whether even that will happen Friday, according to an
aide who helped prepare the speech. “In some cases,” the aide
said, “even one reason would be fine.”
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