This weekend, almost all the members of the current European Union are meeting in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, to talk about a future for their organization, which is looking a bit shaky because of the recent actions of the one member that isn’t in town for the meeting.
In other words, it’s about time to start planning for a Europe without Britain, and that planning has to take place without the exiting British around.
Donald Tusk , the president of the European Council, which sets the political agenda for the European Union, arrived in the Slovakian capital Thursday night with some tough words about what lay ahead.
“We haven’t come to Bratislava to comfort each other,” he said in a prepared statement. “Or even worse, to deny the real challenges we face. In this particular moment in the history of our community, after the vote in the UK, the only thing that makes sense is to have a sober and brutally honest assessment of the situation.”
Reality must rule the discussions.
“One thing must be absolutely clear here in Bratislava: that we can’t start our discussions . . . with this kind of blissful conviction that nothing is wrong, that everything was and is okay,” he said. “It is true that Europe has recently been shaken by all kinds of crises but at the same time it is my feeling that the best motto for the Bratislava meeting is that we must not let these crises go to waste.”
His top three priorities will sound familiar to American political spectators: securing the EU’s external borders; dealing with the terror threat both in Europe and globally, and taming globalization “to safeguard the economic and social interests of the EU citizens while remaining open to the world.”
Donald Trump will not be there.
But all three have been used by at least some members as shorthand for dealing with the now year-old European refugee crisis.
Human Rights Watch this week chastised Hungary for spending almost $20 million to produce and distribute an 18-page booklet that warns “Forced settlement endangers our culture and traditions.”
The booklet is part of a Hungarian effort to convince voters to object to a European mandate that the nation accept 1,294 asylum seekers. Human Rights Watch said other parts of what they call a “government-sponsored disinformation campaign” include billboards asking Hungarians, “Did you know that since the beginning of the immigration crisis more than 300 people died as a result of terror attacks in Europe?” Or “Did you know that Brussels wants to settle a whole city’s worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary?” Or “Did you know that since the beginning of the immigration crisis the harassment of women has risen sharply in Europe?”
It’s the sort of thing that earlier this week prompted Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn to call for Hungary to be expelled from the EU, either temporarily or permanently. As he noted, Hungary’s official government response to the crisis has been to treat desperate asylum seekers as “worse than wild animals.”
“Anyone who, like Hungary, builds fences against refugees from war or who violates press freedom and judicial independence should be excluded temporarily, or if necessary for ever, from the EU,” he told the German newspaper Die Welt. He added that jettisoning Hungary could be “the only way of preserving the cohesion and values of the European Union.”
Hungarian officials, responded angrily. But it points out that Britain’s exit is hardly the only issue threatening the European Union as the council meets these days.
Matthew Schofield: @mattschodcnews
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