The real obstacle to deeper EU integration is the Franco-German impasse, not Brexit
Forget Brexit. The real obstacle to deeper European integration is not the awkward British, whether they choose to stay in the European Union with a “special status” or leave.
It is a long-running Franco-German impasse on how to make the euro zone stronger and more sustainable, reconciling two radically different economic and political cultures.
Now that David Cameron has won a deal to enshrine formally Britain’s semi-detached status in the 28-nation bloc – if his skeptical voters don’t detach it completely – the onus will return to Europe’s founding nations to work out a way forward.
European federalists such as Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel are fretting that the terms granted to Britain’s embattled leader may whet others’ appetite for opting out of EU policies and ultimately lead to a disintegration of the union.
“We must not give the impression that Europe is a self-service,” French President Francois Hollande said. “There can be differences but there cannot be a Europe where each country picks out what it wants.”
The risk of a wider unraveling was highlighted by Austria’s unilateral decision last week to impose migrant quotas at its borders, and the refusal of four central European states to take any share of the million migrants who entered the EU last year.
But it is the breakdown of Franco-German leadership in the euro zone – the economic core of the 60-year-old European project – that worries the architects of European integration.
Paris and Berlin have long slept in the same bed with very different dreams.
In the heat of the euro zone debt crisis in 2010-12, they found just enough common ground: The euro zone tightened fiscal rules and created its own rescue fund, a partial banking union with a common supervisor and a mechanism for winding up failed banks with an embryonic common resolution fund.
But since the European Central Bank averted a meltdown of the 19-nation currency zone by pledging in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro, reforms to reinforce economic governance and mutualism risk have stalled.
