As EU leaders survey the state of Europe from a hilltop castle in Bratislava on Friday, they won’t like what they see: a splintering Continent, beset by populism.

Brussels hopes this summit will change the narrative, but merely gathering 27 presidents and prime ministers under one roof may turn out to be its biggest achievement — and even then, Britain’s absence will illustrate the depth of discord.

The Brexit vote in June created an urgent need for solidarity against a Euroskeptic barrage, but the political imperatives of individual leaders facing reelection fights seem increasingly at odds with the “ever closer union” envisioned in the Treaty of Rome.

Donald Tusk, the European Council president, hopes to restore confidence by rallying leaders behind a tightly focused agenda: to manage the migration crisis by strengthening border controls, enhancing cooperation on internal and external security, and to take steps — somewhat less clear — to prop up the sluggish economy.

In his State of the Union speech on Wednesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he had never seen Europe’s leaders so fractured, or so inwardly focused, which  underscores how difficult it will be to achieve even limited goals in coming weeks and months.

“Never before have I seen such little common ground between our member states, so few areas where they agree to work together,” he said. “Never before have I seen national governments so weakened by the forces of populism and paralyzed by the risk of defeat in the next elections.”

The absence of the U.K. and its new prime minister, Theresa May, imposes limitations on the summit: nothing that is said or done will be legally binding, making it little more than a high-level public relations exercise.

In Brussels, officials worked aggressively to set modest expectations, portraying it as the start of a post-Brexit reassessment and noting that more concrete steps will be taken at regular summits in Brussels in October and December, including a review of relations with Russia, and culminating next year in Italy at a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.

“We just had one of our member states who decided to leave, we cannot just pretend that this was nothing and get on with it,” said one EU official involved in the summit planning.

Possible collapse

“For the first time in decades, senior European leaders have actually envisioned publicly the possibility of the disintegration and collapse of the European Union,” said Michael Leigh, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former director-general for enlargement at the European Commission.

“People are asking the question: Will the European Union survive for the next decade?” added Leigh. “The fact that the 27 should get together following the Brexit referendum and express a common determination to reinforce the European Union is in itself positive.”

If the bar is set that low, Tusk seems certain to succeed, though he has higher aspirations, laid out in a “Dear colleague” letter this week that amounts to a four-and-a-half-page call to action.

The Council’s Polish president exhorted national leaders to recognize Brexit as evidence of broader doubts among citizens, and he urged them to make Bratislava a pivot point.

“People in Europe want to know if the political elites are capable of restoring control over events and processes which overwhelm, disorientate, and sometimes terrify them,” Tusk wrote.

The two most important messages, according to the EU official involved in the planning, are that the remaining 27 members “intend to stay in the EU and make it a success,” and that they need to address people’s feeling of insecurity. However, officials said they were bracing for inevitable disagreement and that Friday’s meeting was unlikely to produce a blueprint for addressing these challenges.

Don’t rock the boat

Preventing open squabbling among the leaders in Slovakia is another challenge, against the backdrop of old tensions within Europe — between West and East, North and South, Right and Left — repeatedly erupting on a broad spectrum of issues, including migrants, fiscal policy and military cooperation.

On some issues, clear factions have emerged. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras convened the so-called Club-Med group of Southern tier nations in Athens, where some leaders lashed out at the austerity policies championed by Germany and other Central and Northern countries.

On other issues, the disagreements have been more emotional: Luxembourg’s foreign affairs minister, Jean Asselborn, said in an interview published Tuesday that Hungary should be expelled from the EU for treating migrants almost like “wild animals.”

Even Tusk, criss-crossing Europe to meet leaders ahead of Friday’s meeting, gave in to the temptation to vent on a stopover in his native Poland, where he rebuked critics of the EU during a meeting with Prime Minister Beata Szydło.

Szydło, clearly aiming her remarks at a domestic audience, said she had conveyed pointed demands for sweeping reforms of the EU, echoing recent talk in Poland and Hungary about a heavy rewrite of the Treaty of Rome as it celebrates its 60th anniversary next year.

Tusk hit back with remarks that underscored his fears about lack of cohesion among EU leaders, saying he had encouraged the Polish government “to treat Europe as something that’s worth being taken care of, not attack and question.”

“It’s important that Poland doesn’t join those who want to rock the EU boat. We need an EU that is stable, strong and as united as possible,” he said.

Playing for time

“In Tusk’s eyes, the purpose of the meeting is to bring back stability and hope to the Union shaken by many crises,” a senior EU official said.

His biggest challenge, however, is the political context: some of Europe’s most prominent figures risk losing their jobs in coming elections, including in France and Germany. Those in the strongest position, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, are often sharply critically of the EU.

Through one lens, the precariousness of the European Union could be viewed as synonymous with the predicament of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has struggled to balance her instinct to lead with an emphasis on Western values, against a backlash from voters at home, where her conservative party just took a drubbing in regional elections.

According to one veteran EU diplomat, leaders are just “looking at the next electoral deadline, whether it is elections in Germany or France or Italy and the rest. Everybody sits at the table and the only thing he or she has in mind is ‘What can I get from here to prove to my public opinion that I am the best, that I am doing what they are asking me to do.’”

“In a way,” the diplomat added, “it is the general problem of the European Union these last few years. The problem is how to reconcile your own views and the general interest.”

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The gains by the far-right Alternative for Germany party are just one example of the challenges traditional parties are facing from insurgent political factions on the Right and Left. Propelled by anti-establishment fervor, they have the luxury of campaigning against politics-as-usual without having ever borne the responsibility of governing.

“I don’t think you have today in any of the member states any serious politician who believes he or she could win an election by saying what we need is more Europe,” said Michael Leigh.

Outside Brussels, there was a similar sense that the main purpose of the Bratislava gathering would be to lift morale and begin a longer process of reflection and collaboration, according to senior European diplomats in Berlin and other capitals, even as some leaders viewed Tusk’s letter as excessively bleak.

Germany in particular has been working in recent days to open new lines of communication including between states where there had been little previous engagement outside formal settings.

And some German officials viewed the effort to prepare for Bratislava, including meetings with the French to develop a joint proposal on enhanced European military cooperation, as perhaps even more useful than Friday’s heavily stage-crafted meeting, the diplomats said.

Tusk, reflecting a view shared by Merkel, has said the short-term answer should be modest but concrete deliverables to show voters the EU adds value, such as stepping up security along Bulgaria’s border with Turkey, and imposing new, coordinated traveler screening programs to identify and intercept potential terrorists.

But it is far from clear those steps will be sufficient to change public opinion. And many of the forces battering Europe seem largely beyond the control of political leaders and institutions.

And some officials said there was a risk that the Bratislava summit would meet the low expectations set by Brussels, and ultimately not prove a turning point.

“I am not expecting that Bratislava will be a sort of dividing line,” the veteran EU diplomat said. “For the moment, Germany has decided not to rush into anything. So essentially it will be a sort of standstill. In a way we are all playing for time, which is not very good under the present circumstances.”