A break with the one-speed model could create opportunities as well as threats. For example, enlargement has ground to a halt within the current EU. But in a messier multi-speed Europe, there may be new ways to integrate Turkey or Ukraine (although Turkey will not be keen on second-class membership unless it includes visa-free travel). Yet whichever of the institutional options Europe's leaders choose, they are unlikely to close the gap between Europe and its citizens — in fact, they may exacerbate it — unless they also change the content and form of European integration.
/from the essay Four Scenarios for the Reinvention of Europe,
Unit III. EU at the Crossroads
European Council of Foreign Relations, November 2011/
Notes:
1. Joseph Martin “Joschka” Fischer (born April 12, 1948) is a German politician of the Alliance ‘90/The Greens. He served as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany in the cabinet of Gerhard Schroder from 1998 to 2005. Fischer has been a leading figure in the West German Greens since the 1970s, and according to opinion polls, he was the most popular politician in Germany for most of the government's duration. Following the September 2005 election, in which the Schroder government was defeated, he left office on November 22, 2005. In September 2010 he supported the creation of the Spinelli Group, a europarliamentarian initiative founded with a view to reinvigorate the strive for the federalisation of the European Union.
2. Angela Dorothea Merkel (born 17 July, 1954) is a German politician and a former research scientist, who has been the Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000. She is the first woman to hold either office the first German Chancellor to be born after World War II, and the first post-reunification Chancellor to be raised in the former East Germany (though she was actually born in the former West Germany).
Angela Merkel has been described as the de facto leader of the European Union, and was ranked as the world's second most powerful person by Forbes magazine in 2013, the highest ranking ever achieved by a woman, and is now ranked fifth. On 26 March 2014, she became the longest-serving incumbent head of government in the European Union. On 28 May 2014, she was named the most powerful woman in the world, also by Forbes
3. Wolfgang Munchau (born 1961) is considered one of the world's foremost experts on the eurozone. He writes the European economic column of the Financial Times. His latest book, The Meltdown Years: The Unfolding of the Global Economic Crisis, won the prestigious GetAbstract business book award in its original German-language version, Vorbeben. He is the recipient of the 2012 SABEW award for best international columnist.
