European leaders should “stop bashing the EU”, Jean-Claude Juncker has said as he sketched out five scenarios for the bloc’s future after Brexit.

The president of the European commission urged governments to stop blaming the EU for problems it was not equipped to solve, adding: “It would do us all good if we simply stopped Brussels-bashing, EU-bashing.”



Delivering a white paper to MEPs in Brussels, he said youth unemployment was one example of the bloc’s limited powers, adding that the main levers to solve the issue were in the hands of national governments. “We shouldn’t persuade people that we can simply conjure up the sun and the moon, at the most we can deliver a telescope,” Juncker said.

His speech came before a summit in Rome at the end of March, when 27 heads of state and government will debate the EU’s future and celebrate its 60th anniversary of the bloc’s founding treaty.

Theresa May, who has promised to trigger Britain’s EU exit talks by the end of March, was invited but has chosen to stay away.

The Rome summit “will not simply be a birthday celebration, it should also be the birth moment of the European Union at 27 [members]”, Juncker said.

The cover page of the EU white paper. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

The white paper only makes one reference to Brexit – a deliberate decision, according to one commission source, who said: “He wants the political debate to be about [the future] and not about Brexit. It is a political message that Brexit is now a matter for the divorce lawyers.”



In his speech to MEPs, Juncker also said: “However painful or regrettable Brexit may be, it will not stop the EU as it moves to the future; we need to move forward.”

After the brief mention of the UK, he said a future EU could be based around “coalitions of the willing”, whereby different groups of countries deepen cooperation on particular issues, such as defence, security or tax. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, voiced her support for a two-speed Europe last month, but Juncker warned that such a “complicated system of concentric circles” would make the EU more complex and harder to understand.

The EU already consists of multiple overlapping groupings: not all countries are members of the euro or border-free travel area. Small groups of countries can join forces in defence, or decide to pass a new law as a result of flexibility in the EU rulebook.



Juncker, who is halfway through his five-year term, presented five options on the EU’s future to the European parliament in Brussels.



He hopes EU leaders, who are deeply divided on migration and the eurozone, can sign up to a plan before European elections in 2019. But he made clear he would not lead the debate after 2019, restating his intention not to seek a second term as commission president.



The first option was to continue muddling through, with poisonous fights over how to deal with the migration crisis likely to continue and “incremental progress” on fixing the single currency.



At the other end of the scale was a plan for a federal EU, where it would have one seat at the G7 or G20 and create a defence union. Another option included focusing the EU on the single market, allowing common foreign and migration policy to wither, but Juncker said he was opposed to this idea, which he believes would reduce the commission to being an administrator. “Europe has to be about more than market, goods and money,” he added.



Although the document looked ahead to the next decade, there was scant reference to new EU members, although enlargement was not ruled out. Neither did the paper deal directly with the EU’s conundrum over Poland, despite references to European values and the rule of law. Poland’s rightwing ruling party is locked in conflict with Brussels over changes to its constitutional court that the commission says pose “a persistent problem with the rule of law”.

Isabella Lövin rejected the idea of a federal EU. Photograph: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

Isabella Lövin, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, backed Juncker’s analysis that EU members were too quick to blame Brussels for their problems.

“Many EU member states have used the EU as a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in their country and taking credit for everything that goes right,” she told the Guardian shortly before Juncker’s speech. “The EU has brought so much prosperity to so many countries and then national governments take all the credit for that.” She also made clear Sweden was not interested in a federal EU.



The speech received a mixed reaction from MEPs. While Eurosceptic MEPs lobbed verbal brickbats at Juncker, others were disappointed not to hear a more assertive defence of European integration.

Guy Verhofstadt, the Liberal leader and staunch federalist, lamented that the EU remained a “loose confederation of member states” in which many decisions can be blocked by a single country. Verhofstadt, the parliament’s Brexit pointman, also took a moment to take a swipe at Boris Johnson. He said the British foreign secretary and Churchill biographer had “forgotten” that Britain’s wartime leader was “the father of European integration”.

Churchill called for a United States of Europe in 1946 but said Britain would be one of the “friends and sponsors” of the new Europe, an ambiguity about the UK’s place in Europe that has haunted his successors.

