In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: Image caption David Cameron's renegotiation could paralyse the EU, a German MP said 
  
 The popular German tabloid Bild asked today: "Is Britain destroying the EU?" The headline reflects the unease felt across Europe over David Cameron's promise to re-negotiate its EU membership. 
  
 Europe now knows what it long suspected: many in Britain have a completely different vision of the EU than those on the continent. David Cameron's European idea is of a flexible, pragmatic union that focuses on trade. The question he asks is: can the EU, as it is currently structured, deliver prosperity? In the rest of Europe they believe that closer integration will build the European dream. 
  
 Officials in Brussels said that Cameron was offering a "pick and mix Europe". His vision was for a Europe "a la carte", where countries chose what they liked and disliked. 
  
 The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said "cherry picking was not an option". There was a similar reaction from the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. "We can't have Europe a la carte," he said. "Imagine the EU was a football club; once you've joined up and you're in this club you can't then say you want to play rugby." 
  
 As regards trying to repatriate powers to Westminster, the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, said it would be a "drawn out and cumbersome negotiation" involving long and complex procedures. The head of the German European Affairs Committee Gunther Krichbaum said the "EU was not a multiple choice event". He compared re-negotiation to "opening Pandora's box". 
  
 No special case 
  
 The German foreign minister went out of his way to say that he hoped the UK would continue to play an "active" and "constructive" role in the EU. He offered a concession: he agreed that not everything decided in Brussels needed to remain at a European level. He signalled that Germany would support some regulations returning to the member states. 
  
 Here's the dilemma. There are several states which believe that some measures, currently operated at EU level, could be returned to national governments. Any adjustments, however, they insist must include all 27 members. There is little support for Britain being treated as a special case. The problem for David Cameron is that he is fighting for a complete overhaul of Britain's relationship with Europe, not a tinkering at the edges. 
  
 The question I heard asked time and again today was what would the prime minister do if he felt he wasn't winning enough concessions. Might he recommend leaving the EU if he didn't get a good deal? A German MP said he thought this negotiation risked "paralysing the EU for years". One German minister was asked about the risk of Britain blackmailing other states to win further opt-outs. He declined to answer. So there is great uncertainty as to what these next years will bring. 
  
 One other unknown. It is far from clear whether the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will push for a major revision of the treaties in 2015. If she doesn't, that will make Britain's task of re-negotiating far more difficult. 
  
 There are divided views in Europe about the referendum. One senior EU official said he welcomed Britain finally deciding whether it wanted to be in or out of Europe. "Let's settle it once and for all," he said. Others said a referendum was "highly risky". Voters might decide to punish the government by voting to leave the EU. 
  
 There were lots of statements about how much Europe needs the UK - but not at any price. Some officials welcomed David Cameron's positive remarks about the EU. However, ultimately David Cameron's vision for the EU - a flexible, adaptable union - is not widely shared. 
  
 The German foreign minister said: "We do not need less Europe but more integration." 
  
 Nothing said today can avoid the reality that Britain and much of the EU have very different ideas about the future of the union. 
  
 What is clear is that Britain will face a difficult and uphill battle if and when it starts to re-negotiate its membership. ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 BRUSSELS — The French are engaged in a lonely military adventure in Africa. The Germans are preoccupied with domestic elections rather than regional affairs. Unemployment in some countries is at historic highs and economies across Europe are still mired in recession. 
  
 Now Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has added to Europe’s malaise, vowing to reduce British entanglement with the European Union — or allow his people to vote in a referendum to leave the bloc altogether. 
  
 The pledge from the British prompted swift retorts from France and Germany, which said no member has the option of “cherry picking” whatever European rules it wants to enforce. But it reflected a growing sense of unease, not only in Britain but across the Continent, that while the acute phase of the financial crisis has passed, the challenge to Europe’s mission and even its membership has not. 
  
 Even the United States has injected itself into the matter, with an unusually public insistence that Britain, a close ally, stay in the union, fearing that its departure would heighten centrifugal forces that would weaken Europe as a diplomatic, military and financial partner. 
  
 With the threat of a sudden breakup of the euro zone appearing to recede in recent months, Europe has seen a resurgence of narrow national interests that risks swamping always-elusive common goals. The bickering is undercutting hopes in some circles that the struggle to save the euro had laid the groundwork for “more Europe.” 
  
 “As pressure from the financial markets recedes and a sense of urgency lifts, the appetite for serious reform is melting away like butter in the sun,” said Thomas Klau, head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Now that markets no longer hold a knife under leaders’ throats, they are slipping back into their normal mode, which is to manage their own immediate reality.” 
  
 For Mr. Cameron, with elections coming in 2015, that means heading off a challenge from the hard-right, anti-Europe United Kingdom Independence Party while shoring up support for his government, which recently admitted that its unpopular austerity program would have to be extended to 2018, analysts said. He is also anxious to avoid the sort of ruinous intraparty split over Europe that bedeviled the prime ministerships of two of his Conservative predecessors, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. 
  
 That comes against a backdrop of declining favorability ratings for the European Union among the British — only 45 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2011, in polls conducted by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project. 
  
 Mr. Cameron’s speech Wednesday in London calling for a referendum had been in the works for some time but, Mr. Klau noted, it was delivered at a moment when the European Union had begun to declare victory over doomsayers who predicted the common currency and even the whole union could crumble. This mood of calm, Mr. Klau said, has given leaders “the political space” to turn their eyes from Europe toward more pressing and, for politicians seeking re-election, far more important domestic concerns. 
  
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 The decision by President François Hollande of France to send troops to Mali to halt an advance by rebels with ties to Islamist extremists reprises a long tradition of French interventions in its former African colonies — and has bolstered the Socialist president’s previously flagging popularity. 
  
 The French move has been supported by the European Union, whose member states share French fears about the spread of radicalism across the Mediterranean. But it has superseded the bloc’s own ambitions to become a serious player in global affairs and still left the French to fight mostly on their own. The union is sending some military trainers. 
  
 Europe’s economic troubles, meanwhile, are far from over, with much of the Continent expected to be in recession this year. Even Germany seems to be losing momentum — its economy contracted by 0.5 percent in the final months of last year. Elsewhere, unemployment is soaring to levels that could threaten grave social unrest, with more than a quarter of working-age people in Greece and Spain without jobs. 
  
 But the European Union, widely criticized as not doing enough to raise employment, has been struggling to put even its own economic house in order after leaders failed in November to agree on a long-term budget for the 27-nation bloc. Leaders will take another swipe at this divisive issue early next month. 
  
 After being consumed for so long by efforts to salvage the euro zone, “leaders now think it is safe and are becoming perhaps too complacent,” said Charles Grant, director for the Center for European Reform, a London-based research unit. “The only time European leaders have agreed to take important steps is when there is a crisis. As soon as the crisis stops they relax.” 
  
 Germany, he said, has now backed away from tentative support for a change in the basic European Union treaties that could help the European Union forge common policies. 
  
 Already distracted by national elections next September, Germany could turn even more inward-looking as Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks to overcome her party’s defeat over the weekend in a down-to-the-wire state election in Lower Saxony. She remains the dominant figure in German and European affairs, but the surprise election setback has dented her aura of invincibility. 
  
 Other leaders, tightly focused on their own domestic concerns, are stalling on critical decisions about how far they want to go in engaging with the union. President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland, for example, said Wednesday that his country should delay a decision on adopting the euro until after elections in 2015. 
  
 While the Polish economy, the biggest in central Europe, has been spared the tumult that has afflicted other nations, opinion polls show flagging interest in adopting the euro. Less than a third of Poles want to ditch the national currency, the zloty, according to recent surveys. Farther to the east in Latvia, which plans to join the euro zone next year, support for the common currency has slumped to under 15 percent in a sign of growing unease with a “European project” that most Latvians had eagerly embraced. 
  
 Domestic politics have regularly trumped broader European concerns throughout the six-decade history of the union and its predecessor organizations, to the dismay of those who want to see Europe live up to a commitment in the 1957 Treaty of Rome for an “ever closer union.” 
  
 But Mr. Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum on European Union membership threatens to elevate national political calculations over common interests to an extent that has alarmed even countries that often share British concerns. ||||| BERLIN | 
  
 BERLIN Jan 23 (Reuters) - The European Union and Britain must be prepared to make compromises, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday after British Prime Minister David Cameron demanded a radical reform of the EU and a referendum on UK membership. 
  
 "Germany, and I personally, want Britain to be an important part and an active member of the European Union," Merkel told reporters. 
  
 "We are prepared to talk about British wishes but we must always bear in mind that other countries have different wishes and we must find a fair compromise. We will talk intensively with Britain about its individual ideas but that has some time over the months ahead," said Merkel. |||||
A: 
British PM David Cameron made an impassioned case today for his country to stick with the European Union, but said it's time for Britons "to have their say" on the matter, reports the New York Times. He promised an "in-or-out" referendum as early as 2017—provided, of course, he wins reelection in 2015. The Conservative Party leader acknowledged that many Brits "feel that the EU is heading in a direction they never signed up to," citing increased regulation by the European Commission as particularly problematic. The Times notes that Cameron's move could be an attempt to pick up votes in the next election, but it is reverberating throughout the globe: "Germany, and I personally, want Britain to be an important part" of the EU, said Angela Merkel, while noting that a "fair compromise" must be found. Meanwhile, the BBC notes that Germany's Bild is running a headline that asks, "Is Britain destroying the EU?" In Washington, the Obama administration has been open about its desire to see the UK remain part of the EU. Cameron noted that an exit from the Union would be a "one-way ticket."