A wide variety of future scenarios for the EU will be debated, ranging from a return to the nation state to a political union. Between these two extremities, one idea is to establish an asymmetrical union – with a political union, a core consisting of Germany and France as trailblazers.
This idea of a kind of multi-speed Europe, if you like, was most recently discussed by German Foreign Minister Franz-Walter Steinmeier, who called on the EU to become more flexible and “to make it possible for groups of member states to go ahead in certain areas, to experiment and to be open to others joining later.” Another idea, recently suggested by Banque de France President François Villeroy de Galhau, was to create a “financing and investment union” in which all the surpluses in the EU would be pooled and transferred to investment projects.