Radio FM4

Kate Farmer

Cutting to the chase

Alle Stories

Erstellt am: 9. 12. 2011 - 14:55 Uhr

2 speed Europe, or the UK and the rest?

Reality Check: EU summit in uproar, Croatia accession for 2013, Durban climate conference, Nicaragua's environmental issues, US Health care

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If you're beginning to get EU Summit fatigue, you're not alone. For some time now there's been a mood of "another day, another summit" around the Reality Check editorial meetings.
Throw in the words "finance ministers" and everyone groans and bangs their heads on the table.

It's not that these events aren't interesting or important, they are, extremely so. It's just a question of how many summits you can scale without starting to slide back down the mountain into the pool of journalistic hyperbole. We've now had so many "last chances", "final crunches", "imminent defaults", "plummeting markets" and cases of "this will lead to the break-up of the EU/Eurozone" that it's hard to find new ways to talk about it.

The EU has taken the idea of "kicking the can down the road" to a whole new level, and last week's "deepening crisis" has become this week's "good old days".

But today is suddenly different. Can kickers in chief, Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have finally stubbed their toes - but not on Greece, Italy, Spain or any of the other "imminent defaulters" - on David Cameron.

It all happened in the small hours of this morning, when the French and German plan to change the EU treaty to include more stringent financial controls across the EU met with a big "no, non and nein" from the British Prime Minister, who insisted on having an opt-out for Britain. Sarkozy declared this "unacceptable" - and the stage was set for a dramatic split in the EU that noone had expected.

The result: we now effectively have a "two speed" Europe, with the Eurozone countries working out their own agreement outside the EU treaty. Even more ominously, it looks as though the rest of the EU might join in this new agreement, all except the UK. So - who was betting on Greece being the first country to leave the EU?

Our Brussels correspondent, Vanessa Mock, told Steve Crilley how the drama unfolded.