The future of variable geometry in a post-Brexit European Union

Abstract

A special report by The Economist on the future of the European Union, published on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, was significantly entitled ‘The case for flexibility’. The report argued that ‘the EU must embrace greater differentiation or face potential disintegration’, and that ‘a more differentiated Europe, based around the idea of variable geometry, a range of speeds or concentric circles, would be a good way to ease the tensions and problems that afflict the present, overly rigid EU’.1 On the same day, as they commemorated the EEC Treaty’s anniversary, the leaders of the 27 EU Member States (all of them, except the UK) adopted, together with the EU institutions, a Rome Declaration in which a more cautious version of the same idea was rendered as follows: ‘We will act together, at different paces and intensity where necessary, while moving in the same direction, as we have done in the past, in line with the Treaties and keeping the door open to those who want to join later’.