Italy, Germany, France pay tribute at EU birthplace
VENTOTENE, ITALY >> The leaders of Italy, France and Germany vowed Monday to improve Europe’s defense and economic prospects as they paid tribute to one of the founding fathers of European unity in a symbolic bid to relaunch the EU after Britain’s vote to leave.
Standing silently together, Italian Premier Matteo Renzi, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Holland placed three bouquets of blue and yellow flowers — the colors of the European Union — on the simple white marble tombstone of Altiero Spinelli on the island of Ventotene.
Spinelli, along with another intellectual confined to Ventotene in the 1940s by Italy’s fascist rulers, cowrote the “Ventotene Manifesto” calling for a federation of European states to counter the nationalism that had led Europe to war.
The document is considered the inspiration for European federalism.
Renzi invited his French and German counterparts to the sun-soaked island off Naples to remind Europe of its founding ideals as the EU forges ahead amid a spate of challenges, from slow economic growth to Islamic extremist violence, after Britain’s vote to leave the bloc.
“Many people thought that after Brexit, that Europe was finished. It’s not like that,” Renzi said after the hour-long summit. “We respect the choice of Britain’s citizens, but we want to write a page for the future.”
He spoke from the deck of the Italian aircraft carrier Garibaldi off Ventotene’s shores, another symbolic location given the ship is coordinating the EU’s migrant rescue operation in the Mediterranean. The ship was anchored off Ventotene’s coast, providing a picture-perfect backdrop for what Renzi has called a symbolic double-whammy of Europe’s ideals and its concrete commitment to unity.
Renzi, Merkel and Hollande all voiced support for improved internal and external defense measures, including better intelligencesharing and beefed-up border defenses, following a spate of Islamic extremist attacks in France that have rattled Europeans’ sense of security.
Renzi said such measures were an “absolute priority” for the EU going forward.
“Europe should have a framework of protection. For security we need to have borders that can be guarded,” Hollande said. “We also want there to be more coordination in the fight against terrorism.”
Merkel said that the European Union is currently facing “enormous challenges” and needed to work together especially on the security front at home and abroad.
“We feel that faced with Islamist terrorism and in light of the civil war in Syria that we need to do more for our internal and external security,” she said. “Defense cooperation ... should be strengthened and the exchanges between our intelligence services must be intensified.”
Renzi also called for greater economic stimulus measures to create jobs, especially for young people, and improve investment opportunities.
For Merkel, the visit to Ventotene marked the start of a string of meetings with other EU leaders to discuss the post-Brexit EU, with visits to Estonia, the Czech Republic and Poland in the coming days and meetings with the leaders of Slovakia and Hungary in Warsaw. Merkel has also invited leaders from the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Austria and other eastern European nations for informal meetings at a government guest house in Germany.
“She wants to support a discussion that is as broad as possible, with as many actors involved as possible,” her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said last week. That is aimed at ensuring that whatever emerges from the post-Brexit process “finds the widest possible acceptance in the member states and in the population.”
Merkel has shown little enthusiasm for grandiose changes to the EU’s structure, preferring to make things work better rather than embark on major structural reform. France, for its part, wants greater EU integration and Hollande is a strong proponent of joining European defense efforts as Italy wants. However the French presidential campaign is getting into full swing and is likely to unleash anti-EU sentiment.
Italy has a lot to gain from a reinvigorated EU as it copes with flat GDP, the migrant crisis and political uncertainties over a constitutional referendum this fall on which Renzi has staked his government’s survival.
Renzi has called Ventotene the “cradle of Europe” and is keen to highlight its historic role in the founding of the EU as Italy seeks even greater integration, particularly on the security front to help it cope with migrants, and flexibility from Brussels as it tries to rein in its record public debt.
Monday’s mini-summit will serve as a warmup for an EU-wide summit in Bratislava in September designed to chart the EU’s post-Brexit way forward. It follows an initial three-way huddle by Renzi, Merkel and Holland in Berlin in the days immediately following the June 23 British referendum.