United Kingdom is a notable absence as 27 leaders gather to discuss reforms, how to handle Brexit.
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European Union leaders gathered in Bratislava on Friday to attempt to negotiate the fallout from Britain’s impending exit discussions, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the bloc as having reached a critical point. U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May was not invited.
European Union leaders, minus Britain, are meeting in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava to discuss the way forward for the bloc after Britain.
The EU already has 18 battle groups consisting of 1,500 troops each, forming the basis of an armed force, But even if those forces grow, leaders of nations most at potential risk from Russian Federation emphasize that the EU initiative is unlikely to match the military deterrence potential packed by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
“Clear choices” must now be made in the run-up to a “key” European Union summit in Rome in March “if we want to be able to give responses to meet the challenges that have come with Brexit”, Renzi said. Hungary is about to hold a referendum on whether to accept European Union quotas on the number of refugees each European Union country should take in and while the other members of the group haven’t gone this far, they are similarly unenthusiastic about the idea.
On the eve of the summit, European Council President Donald Tusk called on EU leaders to have a “sober and brutally honest assessment of the situation”.
In a sign of her waning power, she has failed to convince eastern European countries Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and summit host Slovakia to accept refugee quotas.
Slovak prime minister Robert Fico said: “I will be perfectly frank”. Our position is clear.
The European Union is now struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Although EU nations have mustered other joint military efforts in recent years, they have often been criticized for being slow to move during crises, reflecting the difficulty of mobilizing members of a 28-nation bloc on an ad hoc basis.
“It’s my feeling that the best motto for the Bratislava meeting is that we must not let these crises go to waste”, he said. It must come from the heart. She said: “We need to be able to protect our external borders”. “The recipe to regain control can not be limited to relocation”.
Other EU leaders have proposed jointly owned drones and other commonly held equipment that could supplement European deployments.
“Because of the Bratislava Summit, no ships will be allowed to sail between noon and 17:00 Friday” for security reasons, Petr Pavlasek, head of the Inland Waterway Transport Division of the Slovak Transport Authority, told AFP.
“We didn’t dodge anything”, Mr Hollande said. “The internal market is not something which is a la carte”.
The final statement from the summit, the Bratislava Statement, said that “although one country has chose to leave it, the European Union remains indispensable”.
“It’s not just another crisis, it might be an existential crisis”, he said on Thursday following a meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris.
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