Admitting that the details need to be ironed out, an EU diplomat said “that will still require some work here and there.” In any case, though, “there is a shared understanding that we are facing major challenges that require us to take steps together as a bloc.”
Reformists unite
Putting a historic industry at the center of policymaking while under pressure from an erratic U.S. President Donald Trump, an expansionist Russian President Vladimir Putin and an ambitious Chinese President Xi Jinping, makes sense coming from Brussels, according to Sander Tordoir, chief economist at the Center for European Reform, a Berlin-based think tank.
“I’d consider the EUCO a success, all things considered,” he said. “And the leaders are simply working well together at the moment. But there’s a lot still to be done.”
Tordoir pointed to a pitfall of national leaders supporting their domestic industry first over a joint European scheme. “A solution could be to keep [the] headquarters in Germany as the country that would be spending the most, but then build factories elsewhere,” he said.
Brussels will keep the pressure on, that much is certain. The first Commission official noted that two camps of reformers inside the executive have more or less merged under the external pressure.
“There used to be three kinds of people inside the Commission,” they said, characterizing them as conservatives, reformists and revolutionaries. “The first said the EU is fine and we just need to adapt, not change. The second would want careful reform. And the third one wanted to boldly change everything. The second and third groups now have the same vision.”
Despite the geopolitical upheaval, the conservatives keep arguing things can’t change because of the law, the official complained. “But we make the law, so let’s change it.”
