European Union Faces New Challenges Without The U.K.
NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Hans Kundnani of the German Marshall Fund of the United States about where the European Union goes from here post Brexit.
Listen to the full interivew here.
Last week's referendum has many people wondering what's next for Britain without the EU. Well, here's the other side of the same coin - what's next for the European Union without the U.K.? Hans Kundnani is a Europe watcher with the German Marshall Fund. And he says that while he's not sure that Brexit is a done deal at all, it's clear that reform is needed within the European Union. But, he says, there isn't agreement for how and what to change.
HANS KUNDNANI: The first question is whether what you need to do at this point is move ahead with further integration - in other words, further pooling of sovereignty from the national level to the EU level. Some think that's a solution. Some think that's precisely the problem and what you actually need now is a much looser European Union with what sort of EU nerds call variable integration - a sort of flexible EU of overlapping institutions and competences. I suppose the two real challenges for the EU on which I think the future of the European Union depends are the euro crisis and the refugee crisis. And in both cases, the EU at the moment is in this kind of in-between position where it hasn't fully integrated. There's resistance to going further with integration, but it also is very reluctant to go back.
SIEGEL: Is there a risk of the European Union weakening - or even to the point of unraveling - in the events that play out from the British referendum?