Brexit: May offers hope for EU citizens, wins guarded praise

German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a press conference at the EU summit in Brussels, Belgium, June 22, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

Britain's departure in 2019 will cause the EU to lose one of its biggest members and a global player, but the other EU nations were already looking at some of the spoils of the divorce. They will decide in November where the EU agencies currently based in Britain will move to on the continent, EU chief Donald Tusk announced.

The bloc's medicines and banking agencies are now in London, and almost every EU nation wants one of the two agencies. On Thursday, the EU leaders agreed on procedures for a fair pick.

Discord over whether Britain's exit process could still be reversed surfaced at the summit.

Tusk said when British friends asked him if he could imagine a way for Britain to remain part of the bloc, he told them: "The EU was built on dreams that seemed impossible to achieve. So who knows?""You may say I am a dreamer but I'm not the only one," Tusk added, quoting a lyric from the late John Lennon's "Imagine."Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, however, said the will of the British people who voted in a June 2016 referendum to leave the EU had to be respected.

"I am not a dreamer. And I am not the only one," Michel said.

Michel insisted Brexit negotiations should proceed without fanciful distractions.

"What we also need is certainty, for our companies in Belgium, in Europe," he said. "If we back this image that Brexit perhaps would not happen, it brings an uncertainty."Merkel also focused on imagining an EU without Britain.

"For me, shaping the future of the 27 (remaining) member states has priority over the question of the negotiations with Britain on its exit," Merkel said.