BRUSSELS — Deeply shaken by Britain’s vote to quit the European Union, the bloc’s leaders met Tuesday to confront their most urgent conundrum: how to calm the crisis in the hope that it fades away, while making the British decision so painful that no other country follows.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, attending what might be his last European Union summit meeting, told reporters after a day of talks that he regretted having lost the referendum on membership and would do everything in his power to “encourage a close relationship” with the bloc’s other members.
But if there was any hope that Britain might somehow undo its decision, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany sought to quash it. She told reporters that “I want to say very clearly tonight that I see no way to reverse this.”
Merkel took a hard position toward Britain, saying that her country would defend its own economic priorities and explaining that Britain must use an agreed legal procedure to leave the European Union.
“The discussion today reflected very clearly that everyone felt this was a sea-change, a watershed moment, a historic moment,” the German leader said. The goal was to shape the new relationship with Britain “as a relationship of friendship,” but “we will also be guided by our own interests.”
The leaders of what, for the moment, is still a bloc of 28 countries all agree that the EU needs an overhaul. The two-day summit meeting began the long and divisive effort to rebuild the cornerstone of Europe’s peace and relative prosperity for more than 60 years.
Europe’s leaders also face the immediate task of handling the tensions building over Britain’s desire to seek a divorce while stalling on a formal application.
They want the process to go as smoothly and as quickly as possible and to contain the economic damage, but not so painlessly for Britain as to encourage populist movements in other wavering nations to push for destabilizing referendums of their own.
Merkel tried to thread that needle in a speech to the German Parliament Tuesday before leaving for Brussels, warning that Britain would suffer as a result of its vote and could not expect to enjoy the privileges of membership, like access to Europe’s single market, while sloughing off its burdens.
“There must be and will be a noticeable difference between whether a country wants to be a member of the European Union family or not,” she said.
The shock vote last week in Britain has done more than embolden populist forces that denounce the EU as a distant and meddling force that mainly serves elites. It has also resurfaced deep pools of bitterness and anger left by earlier crises, notably a grinding economic slowdown and an uncontrolled influx of migrants across Europe’s open borders.
The European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, questioned why Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independent Party, attended the European Parliament session on Tuesday.
Instead of dealing with just the crisis of confidence set off by the vote for Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European bloc is called, leaders are effectively confronting all the crises of recent years at one time. Still unresolved are arguments over austerity, the German-led prescription for a financial crisis that began in Greece in 2008, and whether the EU should be merely a free-trade zone or the locomotive of a more ambitious program of “ever closer union,” a cause enshrined in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.
Arriving for the summit meeting, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece — whose country voted in a referendum last year to reject a financial bailout offered by Brussels only to accept even harsher terms to avoid expulsion from Europe’s common currency — described the British referendum result as a “sad wake-up call” that should force the EU to abandon policies of austerity and “endless negotiations behind closed doors.”
At the European Parliament on Tuesday, members of the assembly were united in calls for change but offered no common vision of how. “Europe needs change. But we want to improve it, not destroy it,” said Manfred Weber, a center-right ally of Merkel’s. The British vote, Weber said, “was a victory for the populists and Europe is now at a crossroads.”
Mindful that Europe’s identity crisis is unlikely to be settled anytime soon, the leaders of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia urged the EU to “get back to basics” and focus on reinforcing basic freedoms and building a single market.
“Instead of endless theoretical debates on ‘more Europe’ or ‘less Europe’ we need to focus on ‘better Europe,’ the leaders of the four countries, all formerly communist, said in a statement on Tuesday.
What this “better Europe” — a popular slogan now used by politicians who agree on little else — would look like exactly is unclear. What is clear, however, is that skepticism over the purpose and merits of the EU as it works now is on the rise across wide sections of the Continent.