Merkel backs two-speed Europe

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that she supports a two-speed European Union, with a core group in the euro pressing ahead with deeper integration and the U.K. among the others relegated to Europe’s margins.

Merkel’s comments, made as she prepares to host British Prime Minister David Cameron in Berlin on Thursday, underscore her differences with the U.K. leader, who is pressing for more aggressive action by euro countries to counter the financial crisis roiling the 17-nation currency zone.

“Those in a monetary union will have to move closer together,” Merkel said in an interview with ARD television broadcast on Thursday. “We have to be open. We always have to make it possible for everyone” to join. “But we must not stop because one or the other don’t want to come along just yet.”

With Spain struggling to avoid a bailout and Greece at risk of exiting the euro, Cameron and President Barack Obama&?nbsp;on Wednesday&?nbsp;called for an immediate plan to resolve the crisis. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne stepped up the pressure Thursday, saying Spain’s banks should have direct access to the euro area’s bailout funds, a proposal at odds with current rules and opposed by Merkel.

Europe is already moving at different speeds, Merkel said, citing the Schengen agreement that abolished border controls between some European countries and the monetary union that excludes the U.K. and Denmark.

“This will be intensified,” she said.

‘More Europe’

“We need more Europe, we need not only a monetary union, but we also need a so-called fiscal union, in other words more joint budget policy,” Merkel said. “And we need most of all a political union, that means we need to gradually give competencies to Europe and give Europe control.”

Ceding more control to Brussels is anathema to many lawmakers in Cameron’s Conservative Party, more than a quarter of whom defied the government in October and voted in favor of a referendum on continuing British membership of the EU.

Cameron said the following month that the euro crisis offered an opportunity for powers to “ebb back” from Europe to nation states. “We should look skeptically at grand plans and utopian visions,” Cameron said then. “We’ve a right to ask what the European Union should and shouldn’t do.”

Merkel, in her television interview, said that EU leaders at a summit later this month will discuss a plan to transform the EU into a political union. Still, a breakthrough can’t be achieved at just one summit, she said.

“The economic and political division between the Anglo- Saxon world and the ‘Germano-sphere’ is increasing,” Fredrik Erixon, head of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, said in a telephone interview.

[Bloomberg]- Ekathimerini.com