The 27 leaders – minus British Prime Minister Theresa May – say they want to show they can respond to the challenges of mass migration, security, globalisation and a stuttering economy.
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Underscoring the UK’s new status in the departure lounge of the European Union, the other 27 member states meet in Slovakia without Prime Minister Theresa May.
An EU summit, without the participation of the United Kingdom, in Bratislava will kick off the discussion on the future of EU following Brexit.
French president Francois Hollande issued a rallying cry to other members on his arrival to the conference.
According to the BBC, he also said “prime minister May was very open and honest with me”.
“One understands more and more why Britain was just no good at being in the EU: It can’t defend itself yet will block plans for European army”, Duff said on Twitter.
The U.K.’s pending withdrawal and the two years of talks it will entail overhung the meeting in the Slovak capital of the 27 other European Union leaders as they sought to craft a vision for the future without its second-biggest economy.
Mr Hollande, who leads Europe’s top military power now that Britain is on the way out, said that France and Germany would “continue to work so that we can deliver concrete measures”.
Greeted by soldiers in bright blue uniforms and ceremonial plumes, the leaders held a first round of talks in towering Bratislava castle and then lunched on a river cruise aboard a German-flagged boat down the Danube to informally discuss Brexit.
The 27 European Union leaders are meeting without Britain to map out a post-Brexit future, with increased defence cooperation a key issue to rally a disillusioned public.
The previous year has seen unprecedented divisions between Europe’s central and east European countries on the one hand and the EU’s older member states on the other over the refugee crisis. “To strengthen European Union cooperation on external security and defence”.
Sources from the talks said that indeed, the refugee crisis, the prospects for a defence union and the state of the Union in general, had been the main topics of the Bratislava gathering.
This is tricky since as Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council has discovered on his recent whistle-stop tours of EU capitals, unity is in very short supply.
The Brexit vote in June triggered what European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has described as an “existential crisis” for the EU.
The refugee emergency has been specifically divisive.
In an interview with the Reuters news agency, Mr Fico said Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia would be uncompromising in negotiations.
Britain can not expect access to the single market without accepting free movement of people, the European Commission president has claimed.
Years of economic crisis have pushed up unemployment in many member states, while a spate of attacks by Islamist militants and a record influx of migrants have unsettled voters, who are turning increasingly to populist, anti-EU parties.
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In a sign of the tensions over migration, Luxembourg’s foreign minister this week called for Hungary to be suspended from the bloc for treating refugees like “animals”.
