Order of Business for E.U. in Brussels? Weeds, Then ‘Brexit’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/world/europe/brexit-eu-summit-agenda.html

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BRUSSELS — Less than 24 hours after Britain threw Europe’s postwar order into disarray last Thursday by voting to leave the European Union, dozens of officials from the bloc’s 28 member countries and its executive arm met behind closed doors in a drab Brussels office block to discuss the urgent issues at hand.

The meeting ended without a decision, however, and was followed on Monday by more inconclusive and confidential wrangling in the Albert Borschette Congress Center in Brussels.

The main issue under discussion was not Brexit, as Britain’s departure from the bloc is called, but another divisive cause embraced by British foes of the European Union: the freedom to use certain types of weed killer.

While Berlin, Europe’s de facto capital, has hosted crisis meetings in recent days to discuss how to respond to Britain’s vote, Brussels, the putative capital of Europe, has stuck doggedly to its own stately rhythms. On Friday and Monday, it plowed ahead with arcane debates about weeds, fish, organic farming and other subjects that have come to form the substance of the so-called European project.

This scrutiny of technical minutiae has turned the European Union into a regulatory superpower, allowing it to help set norms and standards used around the world. But that tight focus has crippled its ability to grapple with big issues or to engage with many ordinary people. As the British vote showed, many people feel no connection with what began as an idealistic peace project after World War II, but is now widely viewed as a meddling and undemocratic bureaucratic machine.

One thing many in Brussels now agree on is that something has to change in the way the European Union works. But deciding what that is, exactly, will not happen swiftly, Frans Timmermans, the Dutch first vice president of the bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, cautioned Monday in a post on Facebook.

“The Brexit vote is not an isolated incident and is not just about Europe,” Mr. Timmermans wrote. “It is also about a broad sentiment in Western societies that we have lost control of our destinies.”

The search for some sort of answer will start on Tuesday at a previously scheduled two-day summit meeting of European leaders. It will be the first full gathering of the leaders, including the British prime minister, David Cameron, since last Thursday’s referendum. The group will consider for the first time how to respond to the British vote.

But the leaders will do so only after sticking to the original agenda focused on migration, investment and other matters. The all-important discussion will be squeezed into a dinner attended by Mr. Cameron and other leaders on Tuesday. The British leader will then be excluded from the second day of the summit meeting when leaders of the 27 remaining countries will begin assessing the future direction of the bloc without Britain.

Founded on the premise that countries, including former enemies, can and must work in harmony, the European Union, with its elaborate machinery of consensus-driven decision making, instinctively recoils from any public airing of the bloc’s anxieties and deep divisions.

“The E.U. was not set up as a crisis-management organization, but now it obviously has to become one,” said Paul Adamson, a longtime British lobbyist based in Brussels and founder of E!Sharp, an online magazine devoted to European affairs.

Like nearly all Britons in Brussels, Mr. Adamson said he was stunned and angered by the victory for opponents of the European Union. “We are all in shock and trying to come with terms with what happened,” he said.

He added that “there is still a lot to play for,” including the possibility that Britain might decide not to quit after all, or opt for a close association agreement that would be tantamount to staying.

About the only Britons celebrating in Brussels are the 24 members of the European Parliament from the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, a driving force behind the Brexit campaign. “I have been campaigning for years to lose my job,” Stuart Agnew, a UKIP member of Parliament, said of his position in Brussels.

Confronted with the biggest crisis to hit Europe’s six-decade push for greater integration, the European Commission has sought to present a face of implacable calm, despite anguish over Brexit among its officials.

Asked on Monday at a news briefing what conclusions the commission might draw from the British vote, its chief spokesman, Margaritis Schinas, said that this was a matter for Britain. “The commission didn’t call the referendum,” he said. “The ones who did are the ones who have to draw conclusions.”

Behind the scenes, most Britons working in the commission and other European institutions in Brussels are in a state of barely disguised despair.

Catherine Bearder, a British member of the European Parliament for the Liberal Democrats, said she felt “gutted” on Monday.

“I think there is a feeling across the board of, ‘What on earth is Britain doing?’ ” she said.

Mr. Cameron has said he will resign by October, suggesting that London might wait until then to formally start the withdrawal process, but officials in Brussels want the pace sped up. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, by contrast, has shown some sympathy for Britain’s play for time.

Waiting until October to start negotiating on the terms of Britain’s exit and its future relationship with the bloc might give time for Britain to perhaps change its mind. But this would also slow any efforts to reshape a union that even the most stalwart fans of European integration acknowledge is far from perfect.

Those who support the idea of turning Europe into a federal state are even hoping that the crisis set off by the British vote will invigorate their sagging cause, a prospect that is unlikely to fly.

British opponents of the bloc campaigned on the idea that the constant meddling of unelected officials in Brussels was holding their country down and destroying its way of life. By banning weed killers, in one example.

“Now EU Fat Cats Want to Ban Our Weed Killer,” read a headline in April in the Daily Express, a British tabloid that supported the Brexit campaign.

In reality, officials in the European Commission have been pushing for months to extend an approval, first granted in 2002 and now set to expire on Friday, for the use in Europe of popular weed killers, like Roundup.

But they had problems getting member states to agree in the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feeds. Delays by France, Germany and other governments meant that the issue, like many others in the European Union, continued to be kicked down the road.

“The idea that we wanted a ban was just one of the false myths spread by British tabloids,” said Enricio Brivio, a spokesman for the European Commission’s department that deals with health and food safety. “What could we do? I do not know.”

Mr. Agnew, the UKIP member of the European Parliament, acknowledged that the officials “had actually tried to do the right thing.” He nonetheless derided their fruitless efforts as a symptom of the “E.U.’s shambolic decision making.”

As debates on weed killer and other matters continue in Brussels, the European Commission is trying to avoid a breakdown of its bureaucratic system in the event that the hundreds of British citizens working in the organization suddenly decide to leave. It has assured them that their jobs are safe despite their country’s vote to withdraw.

The most senior Briton in the apparatus, the commissioner of financial services, Jonathan Hill, resigned over the weekend in response to the referendum result.

Some lower officials are hanging tight for the moment, saying they did not come to Brussels just to work for Britain. It remains to be seen, many cautioned, whether Brussels gets the message that there needs to be fundamental reform of the European project.