EU leaders divided on how to respond to British vote

Deeply shaken by Britain’s vote to quit the European Union, the bloc’s leaders met Tuesday to confront their most urgent conundrum: how to calm the crisis in hopes it fades away, while making the British decision so painful that no other country follows.

The leaders of what, for the moment, is still a bloc of 28 countries all agree that the EU needs an overhaul. The two-day summit meeting that started Tuesday with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain in attendance for perhaps the last time began the long and divisive effort to rebuild the cornerstone of Europe’s peace and relative prosperity for more than 60 years.

Europe’s leaders also face the more immediate task of handling the tensions building over Britain’s desire to seek a divorce while stalling on a formal application.

They want the process to go as smoothly and as quickly as possible and to contain the economic damage, but not so painlessly for Britain as to encourage populist movements in other wavering nations to push for destabilizing referendums of their own.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany tried to thread that needle in a speech to the German Parliament on Tuesday before leaving for Brussels, warning that Britain would suffer as a result of its “Brexit” vote and could not expect to enjoy the privileges of membership, like access to Europe’s single market, while sloughing off its burdens.

“Whoever wants to leave this family cannot expect to have no more obligations but to keep the privileges,” she said. “There must be and will be a noticeable difference between whether a country wants to be a member of the European Union family or not.”

The shock vote last week in Britain has done more than embolden populist forces that denounce the EU as a distant and meddling force that mainly serves elites. It has also brought to the surface deep pools of bitterness and anger left by earlier crises, notably a grinding economic slowdown and an uncontrolled influx of migrants across Europe’s open borders.

Instead of dealing with just the crisis of confidence set off by the vote for Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European bloc is called, leaders are effectively confronting all the crises of recent years at one time. Still unresolved are arguments over austerity, the German-led prescription for a financial crisis that began in Greece in 2008, and whether the EU should be merely a free-trade zone or the locomotive of a more ambitious program of “ever closer union,” a cause enshrined in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.

Arriving for the summit meeting, Prime Mini ster Alexis Tsipras of Greece — whose country voted in a referendum last year to reject a financial bailout offered by Brussels only to accept even harsher terms to avoid expulsion from Europe’s common currency — described the British referendum result as a “sad wake-up call” that should force the EU to abandon policies of austerity and “endless negotiations behind closed doors.”

“Let us make Europe more attractive to its people,” he said.