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As David Cameron Leaves Brussels, E.U. Leaders Chart Future As David Cameron Leaves Brussels, E.U. Leaders Chart Future
(about 5 hours later)
BRUSSELS — Leaders of Europe appeared on Wednesday to be traversing the various stages of grief — anger in particular — as they began to chart a path toward a future without Britain. BRUSSELS — With Britain’s prime minister omitted for the first time, European Union leaders at a summit meeting wrestled on Wednesday with an existential question: how to salvage a venture that has provided peace and relative prosperity to 500 million people but has lost public support.
In a move heavy with symbolism, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain returned to London early Wednesday morning after formally informing his fellow leaders in Brussels about the outcome of his country’s referendum on Thursday on leaving the European Union. Mr. Cameron has not, however, begun the legal mechanism that would start the two-year process for withdrawing from the 28-nation bloc, leaving that decision to his successor. “We all need to wake up and smell the coffee,” President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania said at the start of private talks in Brussels on how to relaunch the European Union after the shock of Britain’s vote last week to leave.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France made clear that Britain could not expect to retain the benefits of European Union membership without contributing to the bloc’s budget and accepting its bedrock principle of free movement of workers. In the absence of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, who was already back in London after attending an initial day of talks, the group’s remaining 27 leaders all agreed that the European Union needs to change the way it works if it is to curb a rising tide of populism driven in large part by hostility toward Brussels.
Mr. Cameron, before leaving the 27 other European Union leaders to continue their talks without him, told the leaders over a somber dinner that immigration had been a central reason that British voters, by a vote of 52 percent to 48 percent, elected to become the first nation to leave the union. Presenting the leaders with his own analysis of why 52 percent of Britons had voted to withdraw from the European Union, Mr. Cameron, at a somber dinner late Tuesday, said the main reason was immigration. Polls in other countries show deep opposition to an influx of foreigners.
Even so, Mr. Cameron expressed regret at failing to win the referendum. But reducing immigration, or at least the right of European Union citizens to move wherever they want in the bloc, is currently impossible, because the free movement of citizens is an inviolable principle of the whole European project.
The bloc faces a bewildering range of concerns beyond the pending divorce with Britain: a continuing migration crisis; pressures on the eurozone; a resurgent Russia; the precarious economy in several countries, notably Greece; terrorist attacks on the periphery of the Continent, like the one that killed scores at Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday night; and populist, anti-European movements that are roiling domestic politics across a wide stretch of countries. At the same time, slowing the flow of migrants from outside Europe is something that officials in Brussels consider a notable success. It took a long time and many meetings, but, under a controversial deal with Turkey, last year’s flood of nearly a million people into Europe through Greek islands has slowed to a trickle.
Ms. Merkel said at a news conference on Wednesday at the conclusion of the summit meeting that there would be economic consequences to the “Brexit” vote, given that Britain has the world’s fifth-largest economy and represents up to 17 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product. Migrants are still arriving in Europe after hazardous journeys across the Mediterranean from North Africa, but they are far fewer than the number who arrived last year through Greece — the people used by campaigners in Britain to rally opposition to the European Union.
“This will be a difficult road ahead for trade relations, for many other areas,” she said. “The faster any uncertainty is removed here, obviously, the better it is.” Ms. Merkel said that “this will certainly not lead to additional growth” and that there was a need “to offset what we lose here by the U.K. leaving us.” With no easy fixes to Europe’s public image and no consensus on what a reformed union might look like, the main agreement reached on Wednesday was familiar: to hold another meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia, in September.
As Dalia Grybauskaite, the president of Lithuania, arrived for the second day of the summit meeting, she told reporters, “We all need to wake up and smell the coffee.” She urged her colleagues “to prioritize our main goals, which people think we need to do,” and said leaders need to listen to their citizens’ concerns about migration and the economy. In a final statement, the leaders acknowledged that the British referendum “creates a new situation for the European Union,” and that “many people express dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.” Europeans, they added, “expect us to do better when it comes to providing security, jobs and growth, as well as hope for a better future.”
Charles Michel, the Belgian prime minister, told reporters that a “renewal of the European project” was needed, calling Britain’s withdrawal a “wake-up alarm” for the bloc. Changing a complicated system that has three presidents, two seats of Parliament in cities hundreds of miles apart and, at least until Britain formally departs, 28 member countries, was never going to be decided in a few hours.
As the scale of the blow delivered by British voters sunk in, one of the bloc’s most senior officials took to social media to express his anguish. “The response to this new challenge for Europe will take time to find,” Frans Timmermans, a former foreign minister of the Netherlands and the first vice president of the union’s executive arm, the European Commission, cautioned earlier this week. “We must be brutally honest with ourselves as we debate the path forward. Today, there are more questions than answers.”
The official, Vytenis Andriukaitis, the European commissioner for health and food safety, posted a picture on Twitter on Wednesday showing him with his head bowed, palms covering his eyes, as Nigel Farage, who leads the anti-European U.K. Independence Party, spoke in the foreground. François Lafond, a professor of European integration at Sciences Po, the Paris university, said the task of finding answers was so big that it should be entrusted to a special convention of experts and officials who would be given at least six months to create a new approach. Otherwise, “the populists will continue to grow,” he said. “We have to give a clear signal of change.”
Mr. Andriukaitis, in a blog post, said he had been “grimacing and trying to hide my despair” as Mr. Farage openly mocked the European Parliament. A critical issue, Mr. Lafond said, is which functions should be returned to individual nations and which should fall within the powers of the union. Arguments over this division of labor have dogged the so-called European project since it began more than six decades ago in response to World War II, and have caused numerous crises.
Mr. Farage has denounced the European Union as an anti-democratic project run by elites. His insults prompted the sharp-tongued president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to tell him: “The British people voted in favor of the exit — why are you here?” One of the most serious came in 1965, when President Charles de Gaulle of France objected to proposals from Brussels that he saw as weakening national sovereignty and pushing Europe toward becoming a giant state. Infuriated by what he viewed as an intolerable infringement, he pulled French officials from the Brussels institutions of what was then the European Economic Community.
The British vote has renewed talk of a second independence vote in Scotland, and the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, arrived in Brussels for talks with the European Union. Voters in Scotland, along with those in Northern Ireland, voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union, while voters in most of England and Wales voted to leave. Their departure, a narrow, bureaucratic version of Britain’s, became known as the empty chair crisis.
“I set out very clearly Scotland’s desire to protect our relationship with the E.U.,” Ms. Sturgeon said. “I don’t underestimate the challenges that lie ahead on that path. This is very much an initial series of meetings in Brussels today so that people understand that Scotland does not want to leave the E.U.” It was resolved, as most European crises have been, through back-room haggling and an elaborate compromise ensuring that France would retain its national decision-making prerogatives on major issues.
Back in London, Mr. Cameron faced tough questioning from members of Parliament. Around three-quarters of lawmakers opposed leaving the European Union, and in calling the referendum, Mr. Cameron lost a huge gamble. The crisis unleashed by the British vote, however, offers no bureaucratic fix, as it involves what have long been the European project’s most vulnerable points: its remoteness from ordinary people and lack of democratic legitimacy. The European Parliament, elected by popular vote since 1979, was meant to fill this gap. But given no power to actually introduce legislation, it is mostly seen as a noisy, expensive forum that merely approves measures proposed by the Commission.
“We want the closest possible relationship in terms of trading with the European Union,” Mr. Cameron told Parliament, mentioning the possibility that Britain’s trade relations with the bloc could end up similar to those of Canada, Norway or Switzerland. Perhaps the most significant role played by the European Parliament has been to provide a megaphone for some of the union’s most impassioned enemies, notably politicians from the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP. The party — whose leader, Nigel Farage, and 23 followers hold seats in the assembly — campaigned fervently for Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Asked about Scotland’s disquiet, he said, “We need to negotiate the best possible deal for the United Kingdom and the best possible relationship, and that will also be the best possible deal for Scotland.” They and allies like Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, call the European Union a meddling and alien force, a message that has resounded elsewhere, particularly France. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s right-wing National Front party, wants the nation to hold its own referendum.
Mr. Cameron said the other leaders insisted there would be “no negotiation without notification,” referring to Article 50, the treaty provision that a member state must invoke to leave the European Union. France’s deeply unpopular Socialist president, François Hollande, who is struggling to rescue his own political future as well as Europe’s, said on Wednesday that drastic change was needed. “Keeping the status quo would be the worst,” he said, “because populists would continue to challenge Europe.”
“There was a mature and calm understanding that we need each other, we need this negotiation to proceed well,” he said, while reaffirming that he would not be overseeing the talks. But many of the things Mr. Hollande and like-minded European politicians want to see, such as more pooling of resources from shared European funds — are anathema to Germany, the dominant power on the Continent, which wants to enforce fiscal prudence but resists moving toward a federal state.
Mr. Cameron, the prime minister since 2010, plans to step down. He intends to stay in Parliament, but as an ordinary member. “I will do everything I can, either in this job or as a back-bench M.P., to keep this strong relationship with our European partners,” he told Parliament. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany shut the door on any overhaul involving the revision of European treaties, a laborious process that requires referendums and has often stoked anti-European sentiment.
In Brussels, in response to a question about the scale of the political crisis, Ms. Merkel drew a distinction between the referendum and the crises that included migration and the eurozone. Ms. Merkel said Europe needed to recover its élan and inspire ordinary citizens with an ambitious vision, as the United States did with its space program.
“Now for the first time we are in the situation where one member wishes to leave us,” she said. “We are under no illusion whatsoever that it is, from a qualitative point of view, quite a different task.” “When Russia, many years ago, sent the first people into space, America said, ‘Now we have to send someone to the moon,’” Ms. Merkel said, citing an observation she said a fellow leader had made in private discussions. “So we have to set a positive agenda, positive goals, and try to show we have an ambition, an aspiration to produce prosperity for our people.”