EU The Academic view: A vision for Europe is desperately needed – by Maria Graczyk

 Liberals are better at pointing out others’ faults than at doing self-reflection. They spend more time explaining away the popularity of populism than explaining the fall of liberalism, says Jan Zielonka, adding that the EU has become a caricature of a neo-liberal project and needs a new vision.

For now, we are treading water. We are faking reforms, re-heating old ideas we did not accomplish at a time when there was a better economic situation. Real changes will therefore probably have to be forced by external shocks and therefore will be chaotic and painful.

Nevertheless, nothing happens, politicians dig into the wells. And they return to their discredited policy in previous years. Example? Refugees. For many years we have dealt with warlords and we know how it ended. Today, we are returning to the same model. We have become hostages of Erdogan’s policy with his refugee camps. First of all, I would not like to be hostage to his policy, and secondly – it is a denial of all the values on which liberal Europe was built.

It takes two to tango. Not only is Erdogan responsible for what is happening in Brussels-Ankara relations. When he came to power, he was very pro-European. Nevertheless, none of his efforts to get closer to Europe were successful. He was always told “tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.” In this way, we have deprived ourselves of credibility and instruments of influence on Turkey.

Most EU countries were reluctant towards this enlargement. Just as the Turks were stuck in the EU’s waiting room for years.

Turkey must either be accepted or it needs to be said openly that “we do not accept, but we want to expand our relations in specific areas”. Instead, Turkey has been a candidate for years while we have set its terms.

 It was unbelievable. We left our cosmopolitan, pro-European friends in Turkey on the ice. It was similar with Ukraine. I’m not saying that all these problems were solvable, but I know that if we had followed what we declared, it would have not been as bad as it is. We did everything to destroy these good relations.

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EU: How the European Union Can Become More Flexible - by Catherine De Vries and Kathleen R. McNamara

The European Union, bruised and battered by years of political and economic crises, is at a crossroads.

In a recent speech to the European Parliament, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that today’s political divisions in Europe are like “a European civil war.” Although the decade-old eurozone crisis has faded from public view, the ongoing refugee crisis, Hungary’s and Poland’s descent into illiberalism, and the aftershocks of the Brexit vote continue to divide the continent. In this context, it is not surprising that the EU itself has become an increasingly politicized topic among voters, many of whom have come to doubt the competence and integrity of their political and financial masters in Brussels and at home. Although support for a full-blown exit from the EU still finds only limited public support, Euroskepticism has moved from the fringe to the mainstream.

Yet there is a way out of Brussels’ current predicament. It starts with recognizing that both Macron’s EU speeches and the broader debates between the pro-EU camp and hard-core Euroskeptics rest on a false dichotomy of the EU as a choice between “in and out,” between blind support for the European project and further integration or a retreat into nationalism.

Instead, the future of the EU needs to be built on an acknowledgment of the need for some differentiation across its member states—without losing sight of the broader common European project.

This delicate balancing act requires building the capacity for healthy and overt debate over specific European policies and the shifts in national sovereignty that they demand. “What sort of EU?” is the right question for citizens and their parties to ask going forward—rather than defending a monolithic vision of the future of EU governance as either expansive scaling up or a wholesale shutting down.

Read more: How the European Union Can Become More Flexible