EU leaders look at 6 months of rebuilding EU dream

“I’m not satisfied with the (summit) conclusions on growth or on immigration”, said Renzi, apparently miffed at being excluded from a joint news conference given by Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande at the end of the summit.

During an eight-hour meeting in a hilltop castle in the Slovak capital Bratislava, EU heads attending their first summit without Britain discussed national gripes about the bloc and tried to work out how to mesh them into a coherent and common way forward.

The 27 leaders, who are meeting without British Prime Minister Theresa May, hope their daylong talks in the Slovak capital will provide the broad outlines of a new “Bratislava roadmap” that should lead to a new-look European Union by next spring.

In his state of the union address on Wednesday, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker called for EU countries “to pool their defence capabilities in the form of a permanent structured co-operation”, and proposed a European Defence Fund by the end of the year.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose country has been at the center of the region’s debt crisis and seen the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly from Turkey, over the a year ago said things can not continue as they are. Hollande and Merkel also admitted that unemployment levels remain high and noted the need to bolster growth and employment though increased investments.

The final statement from the summit, the Bratislava Statement, said that “although one country has made a decision to leave it, the European Union remains indispensable”. But Merkel also said she now accepted their argument for “flexible solidarity”, by which they could help in the migrant crisis in ways other than by taking refugees in.

The refugee emergency has been specifically divisive.

“Concerning the freedom of movement of workers and of persons. we are sticking to that position and this is not a game between prime ministers leaving and prime ministers remaining, this is about people in Europe”, Juncker said.

Hollande is trailing in the polls ahead of next May’s French presidential elections. Other EU nations committed extra equipment and personnel.

While the message from the European Union was that free movement of people in Europe would remain, the main item on the agenda was migration from outside the bloc.

Though Greece may have secured its euro future previous year after its third global bailout, it’s still struggling to deliver on its promises to creditors. But it is still struggling to deliver on its promises to creditors.

“I asked them not to do this anymore because the nation-states can not accept it”, he said.

Speaking about his meeting with the PM, Mr Tusk told a summit press conference: “Prime Minister May was very open and honest with me”. How to deal with the euro’s problems remains divisive – on one-side pro-austerity countries led by Germany, on the other more socially-minded governments.

He said that without Germany imposing a firm ceiling on the number of immigrants it is willing to take in, a “suction effect” would continue to draw masses to Europe.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose country was one of the EU’s founders, insisted internal quarrels were not new. When we started with six nations, they were there too.