EU founding states pledge deeper integration

The six founding members of the EU have recommitted to building an “ever closer union”, but they have acknowledged differences with other states and for the first time they have backed a “two-speed” Europe.

At informal talks on Tuesday (9 February) in Rome, where the bloc’s founding treaty was signed in 1957, the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands underscored that for them answers to the EU’s challenges lay in more integration, not less...