Germany and France made it clear on Wednesday that they both want the UK to remain an active and constructive member of the EU – but not at any price, reports The Financial Times.
Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and François Hollande, French president, let it be known that there were limits to the concessions they were prepared to make to accommodate David Cameron’s desire to negotiate a special deal for Britain.
While Berlin played the soft cop to Paris’s hard cop, the underlying message was clear: both countries have an absolute priority in reforming the EU, to stabilise the eurozone and reinforce economic and monetary union. Both warned against any British effort to insist on its national interests without any attempt to compromise.
“A policy of cherry-picking is not an option,” said Guido Westerwelle, German foreign minister, in the first official comment from Berlin.
Germany wants “ambitious reforms” of economic and monetary union to ensure the future of the euro, he said, but that meant “we don’t need less but more integration”.
Ms Merkel praised Mr Cameron’s stress on boosting European competitiveness, which is a constant theme of her own. But she warned that “if the aim is to impose specific interests, every member of the EU has its own interests”.
“We are naturally ready to discuss the British wishes but one should bear in mind that other countries have their own wishes and we have to find a compromise,” she added.
Senior officials in Berlin stressed that the UK government should not misinterpret the mild reception given by the chancellor to Mr Cameron’s speech.
“We are not going to take part in an exercise to push them out of Europe,” said one person close to the chancellor. “But nor can we accept one person saying they want to reform Europe according to their model and no other model is acceptable. We say Europe is a joint venture.”
The public reaction in France to Mr Cameron’s speech was predictably sharp, led by Laurent Fabius, foreign minister. He pointedly said France would “roll out the red carpet” to UK businesses if Britain left the EU, underlining the irritation Paris felt when Mr Cameron used the same phrase about French businesses fleeing Mr Hollande’s high taxes.
The president stressed rather more diplomatically that he wanted the UK to stay in the EU. Just as Germany sees a continued UK presence in the union as a healthy counterbalance to France, so Paris looks to the UK as an important ally in areas where its relationship with Germany is less aligned, such as defence and energy.
The French are irritated by Mr Cameron’s emphasis on the primacy of the single market and his desire to secure exemptions for the UK in areas which they see as core.
The British prime minister’s ambition to reopen the EU’s central treaties to win a new deal for Britain is also a severe irritant to Mr Hollande, who has his own eurosceptics to contend with in the Socialist party. Paris is much more comfortable with the development of the eurozone as the inner core of the EU, and seems determined to avoid a tangle with Britain that holds up moves in that direction.
Read more of this report from The Financial Times.