‘Seize Brexit chance to forge tighter EU’
N. Ireland fears loss
European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker called on EU governments on Wednesday to seize a window of opportunity from Brexit and economic growth to forge a tighter union built around the euro currency and a pivotal role in global trade.
In his annual State of the European Union speech, Juncker sketched out a vision of a post-2019 EU where some 30 countries would form a euro zone, with an EU finance minister running key budgets to help states in trouble.
Tax and welfare standards would converge and Europe, rather than the United States, would be the hub of a freetrading world.
The Commission president — effectively the EU’s chief executive - stressed his wish to heal divisions between eastern and western, poorer and richer member states; he sees that as vital to countering a drive, including by founding powers France and Germany, to set up new structures within the bloc that would exclude some ex-communist members.
“The wind is back in Europe’s sails,” Junker told the European Parliament, citing faster economic growth and the easing of a succession of crises -Greek debts, refugee crowds, Britain’s exit -- that seemed to threaten the EU’s survival.
“Now we have a window of opportunity, but it will not stay open for ever,” he said, emphasising a need to move on from and even profit from the British vote to leave the bloc come 2019.
“We will keep moving on because Brexit isn’t everything, it is not the future of Europe,” he said in a speech that Brexit supporters said showed they were right to take Britain out of a bloc set on creating more powerful, central institutions.
In a carefully balanced, hour-long discourse in Strasbourg, he called on nationalist eastern leaders -- though not by name -- to stop defying EU courts over civil rights, and on westerners to drop attempts to keep out cheaper eastern workers or palm off inferior food products in poorer national markets.
But his core proposal for countering what is known as a “multispeed Europe” by encouraging all states to join the euro and other EU structures faces resistance in both non-euro zone countries and potentially in Paris and Berlin, where the newly elected President Emmanuel Macron and about to be re-elected German Chancellor Angela Merkel are readying their own plans.
Group
“If we want the euro to unite rather than divide our continent, then it should be more than the currency of a select group of countries,” Juncker said. “The euro is meant to be the single currency of the European Union as a whole.”
Meanwhile, the British government needs to provide more clarity and less ambiguity on Brexit for negotiations to succeed, French junior economy minister Benjamin Griveaux said during a visit to London on Wednesday.
Asked what impact a “no-deal Brexit” scenario would have on France, Griveaux told reporters that it would be felt by the whole of Europe, but would be even worse for Britain.
“If it goes wrong, it will go wrong for everyone,” he said.
Griveaux, who helped President Emmanuel Macron set up the En Marche political movement that propelled him to power in May, is part of the 39year old leader’s inner circle.
He was in London to meet company executives, predominantly in the financial services industry, with a view to persuading them to move some of their operations to France after Brexit.
In related news, the European Union has long aided efforts to heal the deep divisions that plague Northern Ireland, and many people on both sides of the sectarian rift fear what might happen when Brexit forces it to walk away.
Since a 1998 peace deal ended three decades of violence between Protestant pro-British unionists and Catholic Irish nationalists, in which 3,600 died, the EU has pumped about 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion) into projects to shore up that peace - more than any other body apart from the British state.
Neutral
It has enjoyed broad support and influence as a force viewed by both sides as a neutral broker separate from the British government, which is distrusted by many nationalists, and the Irish government, distrusted by many unionists.
It has been able to take on projects others shy away from, such as the reintegration of former militants, both IRA and pro-union loyalists, and support for relatives of dead fighters.
Brexit is already rattling the region by raising concerns it will lead to a hard border with EU member Ireland. For some in both communities, the idea of a new, rigid frontier stirs painful memories of the British Army watchtowers and checkpoints that peppered the border during the decades of bloodshed.
“It’s a very fragile situation here, and in Westminster there seems to be a lack of consideration for Northern Ireland,” said Kate Clifford, director of the Rural Community Network, a community group that has received peace funding in the past.
“Without a (EU) peace programme behind that, without the impetus of the external force that is Europe, that honest broker, things will become very difficult,” she said.
While no one expects a return to the widespread violence of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” of the 1960s to 1990s, sectarian tensions still run high and intermittingly erupt into rioting.
Some British ministers argue that savings from leaving the bloc would allow the government to match all EU funding and last month British Prime Minister Theresa May said that her government would consider replacing that European money.
Yet London has offered no guarantees and, with Brexit negotiations between London and Brussels in their infancy, there is little certainty about how leaving the bloc will affect Britain’s finances.
The British government’s Northern Ireland office and the EU’s Belfast office declined to comment.
Since the EU’s Northern Ireland PEACE programme was founded in 1995, funded groups have worked with hundreds of thousands of Northern Ireland’s 1.8 million citizens on conflict resolution, anti-sectarianism and supporting victims.