BRUSSELS—The European Union has known some crises in its time: the constitution that never was, impossible budget deals, debt devastating the Greek economy and threatening the euro currency, strife as nations failed to manage the continent’s refugee emergency together.
But Brexit—a British exit from the 28-nation union—is the EU’s biggest crisis so far. No country has ever left before.
Despite some speed bumps, the EU has grown from the six nations that founded a coal and steel community in 1951 to a half-billion strong trading bloc when Croatia signed up three years ago.
Now that the British decision is winding back more than 60 years of EU integration, no one knows exactly how to pick up the pieces and move on. Should the EU do more or less? How should it interest people in a project that seems distant and difficult to understand? And is the bloc even to blame for this crisis when many simply aren’t happy with their own governments, let alone distant Brussels?
In the background, Greece feels marginalized as its people suffer under tough reform policies imposed by creditors to save its debt-wracked economy. Italy is bickering with Germany over whether that austerity is really necessary. And the Hungarians are going to hold a referendum on refugee quotas.
This is what European political limbo looks like.
While heads have rolled in Britain, where Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned and the three leading figures of the “leave” campaign tumbled or quit, no one is stepping down in Brussels. With the July-August summer recess closing in, everyone is hunkering down and looking toward a summit of EU leaders in Bratislava on Sept. 16 to see what can be done.
The president of the EU’s sprawling executive body—which over the years has proposed thousands of pieces of legislation that impact how citizens live, study, travel or do business—has been an early target for critics. Jean-Claude Juncker leads an administration of some 33,000 people. He and his policy commissioners are routinely portrayed as the embodiment of the unelected bureaucrat, imposing inane, invasive laws on ordinary citizens.
Certainly many in Britain see it that way, even if most proposals are debated between member countries and the European Parliament - whose members are elected every five years - before they become law.
Yet Juncker, barely two years in office on a mandate to reform, is not going to fall on his sword.
“I refuse to allow the commission to be blamed for the outcome of the British referendum. We will not bare that responsibility,” he told EU lawmakers Tuesday. “I haven’t said that we want a ‘United States’ of Europe.”
He said the Commission was endorsed by all member nations, including the departing Britain.
“This is a commission with a mandate to reform and we are doing that,” Juncker said. “It has not overnight lost its legitimacy.”
