Pools EU-voorzitterschap waarschuwt voor nieuwe euroscepsis (en)
EUOBSERVER i / WARSAW - The financial crisis and Arab Spring migrants have given rise to a "new euroscepticism" inside the union, Polish leader Donald Tusk i has warned as Poland takes over the EU presidency.
Contrasting the novel development to the old "ideological" EU-pessimism in the UK, Tusk said continental leaders have begun protecting national interests more aggressively despite their pro-EU rhetoric.
"The union is going through one of the most difficult and complicated moments in its history," he told press at an event in Warsaw on Friday (1 July). "When I speak of a new euroscepticism, I am not talking about traditional euroscepticism as in [the UK], I mean the behaviour of politicians who say they support the EU but at the same time take steps that weaken the union."
Tusk declined to name names, but he pointed to France and Italy in his criticism of border restrictions imposed in the passport-free Schengen zone after Tunisian migrants crossed the Mediterranean en masse.
With Germany intially voicing opposition to the second Greek bail-out, he added that there is a lack of financial solidarity in the union.
"People are saying to one another: 'You're inadequate. You should leave the EU. You shoud leave the euro.' I see such tedencies and I believe the right path is the opposite one ... I am convinced that what the EU needs is further integration," he said.
The Polish leader explained that Poles do not see joint economic governance or externally-imposed austerity programmes as a threat: "We lived for many years as a non-sovereign country, under Soviet occupation. For us European integration is not a threat to sovereignty because we experienced not long ago a serious threat to our sovereignty."
With pollsters saying 80 percent of Poles are in favour of EU membership, Tusk said the Polish presidency "has enough energy" to fight the new EU-hostile trend.
Despite dropping hints about France, Germany, Denmark and Italy's negative behaviour, Tusk signalled he will take a non-confrontational approach to fellow EU leaders over the coming months.
He declined to criticise France and Germany for secretly cooking-up eurozone reforms at a meeting in Deauville, France earlier this year. "There is no point in being upset that France and Germany are so big, but we must make sure they do not exploit their size in an inappropriate way," he said.
He also declined to push for his finance minister to attend meetings of the euro-using countries in Brussels, joking "I don't want to force my way into someone else's house."
The Polish presidency is being launched on a warm but rainy Friday in Warsaw with a VIP gala, four music concerts around the city and little EU and Polish flags draped on lamp-posts on main streets.
Amid Tusk's depiction of Polish EU-romanticism as a medicine for the union's woes, surveys also say that most young Poles do not know what the EU presidency is and economists do not expect Poland to join the debt-stricken euro before 2018, not in 2015 as mooted before the crisis.
Meanwhile, Tusk, in the run-up to 1 July, opened himself to charges of the same national egoism he diagnosed among his peers when Poland blocked an agreement to further cut CO2 emissions in order to protect its coal sector.
"This [kind of] approach can prove a threat to Europe as a whole," Kuba Gogolewski, an eviornmental campaigner with CEE Bankwatch Network, said.