The people running the EU have always wanted it to be uniform. True, Britain and Denmark were granted opt-outs from the euro, judicial co-operation and some other areas, but the orthodoxy in Brussels, Berlin and Paris has been that all member states should be committed to the same aims and ambitions, even if some are progressing towards them more quickly than others. EU officials still claim that Poland is only a few years away from joining the euro, even though that is not how it seems in Warsaw.
But as the EU navigates the challenges of Brexit, migrant flows, a still-problematic eurozone and a hostile neighbourhood, it will need to become more flexible in order to flourish. To his credit, David Cameron understood this. When he renegotiated the terms of Britain’s membership, he won an opt-out from the treaty commitment to “ever-closer union”, as well as wording that the treaties should not “compel all member states to aim for a common destination”. The European Commission and the French and German governments prevented Cameron from pushing further in this direction – and, in any case, the words agreed in February 2016 had no legal standing after the British referendum.
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