European Politics Thread

An authoritarian European Commission was to blame for Brexit and must give up on its federalist dreams or risk the disintegration of the European Union, eastern European states have warned as the continent’s divisions were laid bare.

“The EU has to change, we have to reform it," the Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo told the European Council president, Donald Tusk, at a meeting in Warsaw designed to ensure that post-Brexit Europe could present a united front at a summit in Bratislava on Friday.

The east-west split in Warsaw came on the eve of today’s keynote ‘State of the Union’ speech by Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, which aides had also hope would provide a “big bang” moment to show the Europe could deliver for ordinary citizens.

Instead, European capitals descended into a round of bitter mutual recrimination over the future direction of the continent.

The divisions in Warsaw were echoed by calls from the Luxembourg foreign minister for Hungary to be expelled from the European Union for its authoritarian stance on media freedoms and its decision to build fences to keep out refugees.

Jean Asselborn said Hungary was breaching the “basic” values of the EU: "Anyone, like Hungary, who builds fences against war refugees or breaches press freedom and the independence of the justice system should be temporarily, or if needed forever, excluded from the EU,” he told Die Welt.

His Hungarian counterpart, Peter Szijjarto, then hit back, accusing federalists like Mr Asselborn of "working tirelessly to demolish European security and culture" and describing his Mr Asselborn as "condescending, uppity, and frustrated."

The foreign ministers of Germany, Latvia and Lithuania then all stepped in to try and smooth ruffled feathers, with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier saying he understood EU “impatience” but added it was not helpful “to show a European member state the door."

What are the arguments?

At the heart of the dispute are two conflicting visions of Europe: Poland and other eastern EU states want a Europe based on “democratic communities - national democracies”, while western states like Italy, Germany and France - under its current leadership, at least - want deeper integration.

While the eastern states have been lobbying for a “Europe of capitals”, France, Italy and Germany have begun a big push for a so-called “EU Army” as a symbol of Europe’s ability to come together to address common issues, such as external border security.

This week the French and German defence ministers published a six-page working paper in which they called for rapid moves towards a “European defence union” that would see Europe having a unified command structures and EU battlegroups that it could deploy to the field.

For now, it is far from clear that eastern European countries, which are economically dependent on richer core EU countries, will win the argument over the future direction of the continent.

Which view will prevail?

As a sign of European anxiety, a recent paper from the EU’s influential Bruegel think-tank proposing a “continental partnership” for Europe in which reluctant nations like the UK would be allowed a looser relationship, was slapped down hard in Brussels and Berlin.

A senior European Commission source described the Bruegel to The Telegraph as “a disaster”, while official sources in Berlin said that one its authors, the former German environment minister Norbert Röttgen, had been seriously rebuked for even lending credence to an idea that risked unravelling the Union.

However Europe’s stability is also under threat from incipient banking crisis in its southern periphery and the threat that the Greek debt crisis could explode again later this year if the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pulls out of the current bailout deal.

Germany has already indicated it would withdraw from the deal if the IMF refused to support the package, a move that would again exposed the deep north-south divisions in Europe over economic austerity and Germany’s refusal to invest more of its surpluses to stimulate growth.

For now, starting with Mr Juncker’s speech on Wednesday, Europe’s governing elites will make a concerted effort to keep the “EU of 27” together, announcing a series of popular and deliverable polices aimed at showing EU citizens there is “something in it for me”.

Among the policies expected to be announced by Mr Juncker are the measures on deepening EU defence co-operation, an EU coastguard, boosting youth unemployment and improving internal and external border security.

However long-standing critics like Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, argue that none of these policies will address the fundamental issues of economy, immigration and identity that were thrown up by Britain’s vote to leave the EU.

“Honestly, if the best think that Juncker and Europe can come up in answer to Brexit is an ‘EU Army’,” he said, “then you know they really are in big trouble.”

Among the policies expected to be announced by Mr Juncker are the measures on deepening EU defence co-operation, an EU coastguard, boosting youth unemployment and improving internal and external border security.

The deputy head of the European Commission said a dispute with Warsaw over Poland's top court has not been resolved, while European lawmakers lambasted the EU's biggest ex-Communist state on Tuesday for undercutting democratic checks and balances.

Earlier this summer, the European Union executive gave Poland's nationalist-minded government until late October to reverse changes to the country's Constitutional Tribunal, which Brussels says go against democratic principles.

With U.S. and EU pressure piling up on Poland, Warsaw has since offered some concessions. But Commission deputy head Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday: "At this stage, the dispute concerning the composition and the judgments of the constitutional of the tribunal remains unresolved."

Tensions between Warsaw and Brussels have grown steadily since the Law and Justice (Pi S) party won elections a year ago, introducing a eurosceptic tone to foreign policy, defying Brussels and Berlin on migration and carrying out changes at home that critics say threaten the rule of law.

The Pi S government says it has a strong public mandate to carry out reforms and accuses the main opposition, the pro-EU Civic Platform (PO), of undermining its own country abroad.

"This is not a debate against Poland but about the abuses of the current authorities that threaten democracy, rule of law and go against its own society," said Janusz Lewandowski, a PO member of the European Parliament told the chamber.

His parliamentary faction, the European People's Party, teamed up with four other groups to draft a resolution criticizing the Polish government for undermining democratic standards and values. The European legislature was due to adopt it on Wednesday.

The deepening dispute has tarnished Poland's reputation in the EU and has also bitterly divided the country of 38 million.

Speaking separately in Warsaw after talks with Poland's Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, European Council President Donald Tusk, formerly the head of PO and Poland's prime minister for seven years, told reporters: "A large part of Europe would want Poland to be a very reliable country again, including on the rule of law."

But Pi S' own faction within the European Parliament and some other Polish lawmakers defended the government.

"The EU is going through the greatest crisis ... Brexit, a possible exit of other countries, lack of democratic standards, migration crisis. And now you are orchestrating a debate on Poland," said Ryszard Legutko, a Pi S MEP.

"Why? I think because your political allies lost their monopoly on power and they can't get to terms with it."

There is little sign Poland will bow to the pressure and it is highly unlikely that the European Commission would be able to punish it directly with the maximum sanction foreseen in such cases — stripping Warsaw of its voting rights in the EU.

Poland's souring ties with Brussels may backfire, however, as the bloc is reviewing its common budget and some EU states want to take funds away from Warsaw to punish the member state they increasingly see as a trouble-maker.

(Reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Catherine Evans)

European newspapers have been debating the future shape of post-Brexit Europe this week - and some are not sure European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's widely expected state of union address offered many answers.

The Economist: Assimilation report

A year after Angela Merkel welcomed migrants, two Syrians differ on whether integration can work

IF ALL of the roughly 567,000 Syrian refugees currently in Germany were like Firas Alshater (pictured), there would be no integration problem. Mr Alshater is living proof that alienation and trauma can be overcome with a good attitude. In Syria, he was tortured in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons for nine months. “You sit there, hear the torment of others, and you don’t know when it’s your turn,” he recalls. In 2013 he escaped to Germany. “I had heard that the Germans are closed,” he says. “No, they’re not!” Now 25, he rarely looks back.

But Mr Alshater fled to Europe at a time when the flow of migrants was still manageable. That changed a year ago, during the night of September 4th-5th. Masses of refugees who had trudged through the Balkans were stranded in a train station in Budapest. Fearing a humanitarian disaster, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, allowed the whole lot into Germany. What was meant as a one-off exception was interpreted in the Middle East and Europe as a new open-borders policy, attracting even more refugees. Germany’s initially euphoric “welcome culture” soon soured, especially after New Year’s Eve, when crowds of mainly Arab men, including refugees, robbed and sexually assaulted women during festivities in Cologne and other cities. Now, as Germans mark the first anniversary of their experiment, many worry that integrating refugees will prove harder than they ever imagined.

Mr Alshater burst into the public eye shortly after the Cologne assaults, like an angel of cross-cultural mingling. Speaking fluent German by now, he put his Syrian theatre-studies degree to good use with a self-produced You Tube clip. “Who are these Germans?”, he promised to explain, sitting on a couch with a scraggly beard and body piercings. As with all his succeeding clips—called Zukar Stückchen, mixing the Arabic for “sugar” with the German for “cubes”—the video has negligible intellectual content but oozes comedy and goodwill. In one stunt, Mr Alshater stands blindfolded in a Berlin square until people spontaneously begin hugging him.

The clips went viral, helping Mr Alshater to launch a promising career in German media. With a partner, he is producing more Zukar Stückchen and will air his first television film this month. All this makes integration look easy. Is he a role model? “I don’t even know what ‘integration’ is,” he shrugs. “I accept them, they accept me, and I don’t bother anybody.”

Others are less sanguine, among them Germany’s best-known Syrian immigrant of an earlier generation, Bassam Tibi. The 72-year-old Mr Tibi was born into an aristocratic family in Damascus. He learned to recite the Koran as a child, and grew up imbibing the anti-Semitism that pervaded his environment. But in 1962 he came to Germany, studied with renowned German-Jewish philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and embraced the West’s tolerant and open society. As a professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen for four decades, he popularised the term “Euro-Islam”, arguing that Muslims can and should integrate by blending their traditional and adopted cultures into a secularised and modern faith.

But of late Mr Tibi has turned pessimistic. Mrs Merkel’s welcome last year, he thinks, could even turn Germany into a “failed state”. Recently, he spoke with ten young Syrians. “Two of them spoke German, were doing well, and reminded me of myself back then,” he says. “The other eight were telling me that ‘Allah gave us Germany as a refuge, not the Germans’.” Most Syrians and other Muslims, he now thinks, will never integrate, instead retreating into misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic worldviews and segregating themselves in radicalised enclaves.

Many Germans share his worries. Anxiety has risen since July, when a Syrian refugee blew himself up outside a concert in Bavaria, injuring 15 people, and an Afghan refugee hacked several passengers on a train with an axe. Both claimed to be acting on behalf of Islamic State. The government knows of 340 cases in which Islamic extremists have infiltrated refugee camps in search of recruits.

Hard information on the progress of integrating refugees is elusive. Crime statistics suggest that “refugees, on average, are as likely or unlikely to become delinquent as the local population”, according to the interior ministry. Indeed, relative to their numbers, Syrians are under-represented among criminal suspects. (Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians are over-represented, but rarely qualify as refugees.) Other objective measures of integration—such as the speed with which the newcomers learn German, acquire vocational skills and find jobs—will take years to assess. As of July, the backlog of unprocessed asylum applications was still more than half a million cases. With so much unknown, anxiety only increases.

Mr Alshater is always cheerful in his videos, but in person can appear tired and sad at times. He tries bravely to remain optimistic. Integration just takes a lot of time, he says. “When I came, just that fucking paperwork took a year,” he says, displaying an idiomatic command of German expletives. “But those now crammed in the camps with hundreds of other refugees— how are they supposed to integrate? Speaking to a wall? To an oak tree?”

Mr Tibi, convinced that integration will fail, blames not only the refugees. The German government thinks the challenge of integration boils down to teaching refugees German and getting them jobs. But it is really about identity, he says, and this is where German society fails. During his own stints at American universities, he was always impressed by how quickly he felt a sense of belonging. In Germany, even after writing 30 books in German and marrying a German wife, people still make him feel foreign. “I suffer from an identity crisis, but I go to a psychoanalyst and lie on the couch,” Mr Tibi says. “These 16-year-olds go to Islamic State.”

The fog of politics

After the Brexit vote, the European Union is pushing for more military integration. Its proposals mostly miss the point

TERRORISM, Russian bullying, chaos in the Middle East and the possibility of a President Donald Trump: it is no surprise that the European Union wants to put defence and security at the top of its agenda. As the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, put it in his “State of the Union” speech on September 14th: “Europe needs to toughen up. Nowhere is this truer than in our defence policy.”

Although personally devoted to the federalist vision of a European army, Mr Juncker was careful not to raise its spectre on this occasion. Instead, he rattled off a number of ostensibly more achievable goals, some of which had been floated a few days before in a paper prepared by the French and German defence ministers. It was discussed at last week’s informal summit of European leaders in Bratislava; next week, EU defence ministers will be back there to take the talks further. The goal is to have a set of proposals agreed in time for the next summit in December.

Most of the ideas are fairly old ones to enhance co-operation between the armed forces of willing EU members; they are being dusted off to meet the new mood of anxiety. The proposals include the establishment of a permanent military headquarters to plan and run EU military and civilian missions, such as Operation Sophia, launched last year against migrant-traffickers in the Mediterranean, and Operation Atalanta, an anti-piracy campaign off the coast of Somalia that began in 2008. Up till now, such missions have been run from H Qs in nominated member states.

Britain has long vetoed the idea, worried that it would be expensive, duplicate stuff that NATO is much better equipped to do and unsettle the alliance. Brexit makes the new HQ more probable. NATO seems relaxed, as long as it stays relatively small: say, a few hundred people compared with the 8,500 NATO employs to do this sort of work. Finding the money for even such a modest outfit, though, will not be easy.

Another goal of the Franco-German plan is something called “permanent structured co-operation”, or PESCO. This would allow a core group of countries voluntarily to take steps towards greater integration of their military capabilities. There has been nothing to prevent it being used in the past; Britain could not have stopped it. But the desire to do so has been lacking. Nick Witney, a former head of the European Defence Agency (EDA), which promotes co-operation in acquiring military equipment, remains sceptical of PESCO because it is hard to decide who should join and who should not.

Relations between NATO and the EU, often tense, have recently improved. At the NATO summit in Warsaw this summer, the two organisations issued a joint declaration on how they would work together against new threats such as cyber-attacks, uncontrolled migrant flows and “hybrid warfare” (the mix of conventional force, political subversion and disinformation that helped Russia conquer Crimea). NATO insiders say “the atmospherics are different now” and there is little risk of the EU supplanting NATO.

An idea that deserves a cautious welcome is the creation of an EU fund to finance defence-related research and development. It will start small but the aim is for it to grow to around €3.5 billion ($3.9 billion) within a few years. Again, the problem is not the concept, but getting member states to cough up the money.

Similarly, a new emphasis on “pooling and sharing” military kit, a longstanding aim of the EDA and of NATO, is nice in theory but has proved hard in practice because governments fret about losing control of their forces. Some countries have come together to share aerial-tanker capacity, but pooling and sharing can work only if there is a firm understanding about how such assets will be used in a crisis.

Europe’s biggest shortcoming in defence is not its command structure but its capabilities. Successive American administrations have implored their European allies to stop cutting their military budgets and to spend what money they have on the things that matter. That means modern equipment rather than static divisions, bloated bureaucracies and pork, says Kori Schake, a former Pentagon official now at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank.

In the past year, most European defence budgets have stopped declining. Some are now gently rising. But only a handful of NATO’s European members—Britain, Estonia, Greece and Poland—meet the alliance’s 2% of GDP spending target (see chart). If the new push for EU defence acts as a spur to more spending on modern kit, the Americans will be happy; but if it is just posturing, their exasperation will only be reinforced.

Jonathan Eyal of RUSI, a British think-tank, has a different concern. Much of this activity, he believes, is a sign of desperation on the EU’s part that the member state with the most effective armed forces will soon quit the club. But Europe, he says, is having the wrong debate. “The most urgent need,” he says, “is to find a way to keep Britain as integrated in Europe’s defence as possible.”

It is sadly becoming a norm for all countries to quickly go for the most painful (or attempt at painful) attack on any other country.