Nicola Sturgeon recently unveiled her government’s well-trailed, long-awaited Brexit paper. The 62-page paper sets out two options. The Scottish Government’s preferred outcome is for the UK to participate fully in the European single market and to remain within the EU’s customs union. Daniel Kenealy argues that these plans may be politically savvy, but are all-but-impossible to put into practice.
Sturgeon proposes that the UK joins the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement, by way of membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). This would be the softest Brexit imaginable. Failing that, the paper calls for Scotland “to remain within the EEA and the European Single Market” (para. 107). How, you ask? The UK Government would make it clear, upon triggering Article 50, that it is seeking a differentiated settlement for Scotland. That settlement would likely involve the UK sponsoring a bid for some form of Scottish membership of EFTA, after which Scotland would seek to become party to the EEA Agreement, thus securing full participation in the single market. The final piece of the puzzle, in order for Scotland to participate fully in that market, would be a new devolution settlement that would see wide-ranging powers transferred to the Scottish Parliament. This would, says Nicola Sturgeon, come closest to respecting the wishes of the Scottish people who voted, by 62% to 38%, to remain in the EU whilst also respecting the result, across the UK as a whole, to leave.
The document is certainly an exercise in creative thinking. It would be wrong to categorically label the proposal for Scotland to join the EEA via EFTA, whilst remaining part of a UK that is neither a member of EFTA nor a party to the EEA, as impossible. It will be my previous sentence, and sentences like it, that SNP politicians trot out in the weeks and months ahead. But the proposal is all-but-impossible and the legal, political, and technical barriers standing in the way of it are high, and almost certainly insurmountable. It is telling that Charles Grant – a member of Nicola Sturgeon’s Standing Council on Europe and a man who understands Brussels as well as anyone – labelled it “very hard to make work”.
This article is not the place to explore all of the problems with the proposal, but let me identify just a few. First, membership of EFTA is open to ‘any State’ (Article 56). Scotland is not a state and thus the EFTA Treaty would have to be amended. Beyond that, a sub-state entity like Scotland becoming a party to the EEA Agreement would require the approval of 27 EU member states and the current 3 EEA-EFTA states. Many of these states will be rightly cautious about the precedent set, given their own secessionist movements (Spain had already poured cold water on the Scottish Government proposal).
Furthermore, although the Scottish Government identifies examples of differentiated solutions within the current EEA arrangements they are poor comparators. The paper rightly makes the point that “Denmark is a [EU] member state, but parts of its territory – Greenland and the Faroe Islands – are currently outside the EU and the EEA” (para. 108). The paper references the Faroe Islands example repeatedly and indeed the Faroe Islands have been seeking EFTA membership with Denmark as their sponsor, although that is making slow progress. But to claim that Scotland can be considered similar to the Faroe Islands is akin to claiming that the UK can be considered similar to the Channel Islands. To use arrangements made to accommodate tiny overseas territories as an example for a country of 5.3 million people, possessing major population centres and a diversified economy, is stretching the sinews of credibility.
Finally, in order for Scotland to meet the obligations of EEA-EFTA membership, almost all areas of policy would have to be devolved – immigration, business regulations, employment law, competition policy, product standards to name just a few. This would not be a revision of the devolution settlement; it would be accomplishment of de facto independence via a murky and technical back door.
If the policy proposal is all-but-impossible, why has the Scottish Government gone to the trouble of publishing it? One word: politics. The proposal is politically savvy in at least three ways. First, it allows the SNP to play on the politics of difference, which has proven a highly effective strategy for them. It reminds everybody of the differential referendum result in Scotland, as opposed to the UK as a whole, and the need for distinctive Scottish values and interests to be promoted. It does this not only vis-à-vis the EU but also more broadly as regards immigration, with Nicola Sturgeon able to take a stand in favour of free movement in contrast to the UK Government.
Second, it allows SNP officials to engage in para-diplomacy (where sub-national entities engaging in international relations). Whilst forms of economic and cultural para-diplomacy are fairly common, political para-diplomacy is less common and tends to be employed by sub-national governments seeking greater autonomy or independence. It involves seeking recognition and legitimacy internationally as something more than a region. When local leaders are seen in international contexts, negotiating and battling for the interests of their territory, this can operate as a form of nation building. It is something that the SNP have attempted to do since coming to power in 2007. Brexit, and the pursuit of a differentiated deal for Scotland, have allowed for this type of activity.
Third, it taps into the argument that the UK Government and/or Westminster do not defend Scotland’s interests. My friend Stuart MacLennan – with whom I’ve published on the Scotland-EU relationship – pithily and accurately sums it up: “From a nationalist perspective, it makes good practical sense to march supporters to the top of the EEA hill, only for big, bad Westminster to march them back down again. But for the Scottish Government to present itself as pursuing a policy it must surely know has no chance of success is fundamentally dishonest”. I agree. It is dishonest. And the paper is shallow in terms of policy: many pages are taken up by a rehashing of the importance of the Scotland-EU relationship and when examples are used they are questionable ones.
The question now is what happens next? Theresa May yesterday played down the idea of a differentiated settlement. But the ball remains in her court. In the New Year attention will focus on the details of the deal that the UK Government will seek to make with the EU. And in March we are told Article 50 will be triggered. If Nicola Sturgeon’s proposals are largely shunned by the UK Government – as they almost certainly will be – then the ball will be back in her court. Alex Salmond has recently and boldly asserted that he thinks the SNP would score a victory in a second independence referendum. And Sturgeon, in her foreword to yesterday’s paper, maintained a second independence referendum as an option (p. viii). Given the current state of public opinion , this may well be bluff and bluster. At the very least a rejection of these proposals by Theresa May could set the stage for another showdown between the Scottish and UK Governments, this time over the politics of a second independence referendum.
Note: This article was first published at LSE Brexit gives the views of the authors, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
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Daniel Kenealy – University of Edinburgh
Daniel Kenealy is Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches and researches devolution and EU politics. He is the co-editor of The European Union: How Does it Work? (Oxford University Press, 2015), has published on Scotland’s relationship with the EU, and was expert adviser to the Scottish Parliament’s EU Committee during 2013-14.
Based on Article 56, EFTAs open to any state policy makes Independence an even more attractive proposition. If May continues the Hard BREXIT path then, Scots will see that their best interests as being sidelined to suit the Tory/UKIP agenda.
the SNP will wait for the negative uncertainties of Brexit to truly take hold on the UK economy, while at the same time poking at english nationalism (now supported politically by the tories), to generate a pushback, not just in Scotland but the UK as a whole,
bar catastrophic news, I would expect plans for a 2nd referendum to be held after the next general election, especially if the tories were to win handsomely in England.
by that time (2019-2021), it’s not just Scotland that would be in turmoil, but also Northern Ireland where the DUP are making fools of themselves
Such a shame that no-one can write about politics without letting their own (in this case presumably blue) colours show through:-
For instance?
You call the SNP approach “dishonest”.
Is it dishonest? Really?? The SNP are trying to achieve what Scottish voters wanted – a way of remaining in the EU. That compares very favourably to the lies of the Brexiteers – where, for example, is the 350 million GBP a day for the NHS? Talk about dishonest….
Similarily the SNP want the UK to remain in the single market. Quite right too. Every sane person wants the same thing. Now contrast that to the wholly dishonest approach being taken by this Tory junta – a vote was held on EU membership. No vote was held on membership of the single market. Yet May and the rest of her right-wing rump are determined to take the UK out of the single market? Where is their mandate?? There was no vote taken on the single market. Talk about dishonest…
No. You have it wrong.
It seems to me – and to many others – that the SNP are trying to find a way forward. In true EU style, they are looking for compromise. And what a refreshing contrast that approach provides compared to the insular, locked-in, shut-down attitude of the UK government and official opposition! More power to the SNP and Scotland!
finally a wise opinion… totally agree!!!
While offering nothing in the way of fresh insights, Daniel Kenealy provides a reasonable assessment of Nicola Sturgeon’s’s Brexit proposals. But he loses the plot altogether with the suggestion that these proposals are “dishonest”. This necessarily implies that it is wrong for the democratically elected Scottish Government to pursue an outcome which both serves the interests of the Scottish nation and respects the will of the Scottish people, just because that outcome may be “all-but-impossible” to achieve.
The accusation of dishonesty is not only unjust and offensive, it also makes no sense when made in conjunction with acknowledgement of the sound political reasoning behind the proposals. There is an illogic here which will be familiar to anyone who is acquainted with contradictions and inconsistencies which litter British nationalist propaganda.
From a strictly Unionist perspective, even a proposition which is recognised as perfectly reasonable and politically astute must be denounced in some way if it fails the test of ‘Britishness’. Nicola Sturgeon is branded “dishonest” simply because she declines to put the interests of the British state before her solemn duty to the people she was elected to serve.
I’ve read your blog before, Peter, and you do have a bit of a bad habit of accusing anyone who says anything negative about the SNP of putting out “British nationalist propaganda”. It’s wildly over the top and doesn’t do your argument any favours.
The situation here is whether we think the SNP’s proposals on the EU are genuine and workable, or whether they’re more interested in posturing for political reasons. Your average angry SNP supporter on the internet is generally pretty woeful at treating SNP proposals with scepticism, but personally, as someone who campaigned for Remain, I can see both merit in their position and a fair dose of posturing. Whether that makes it “dishonest” is a side issue – they’re no more dishonest than any other political party in this sense, but it’s pretty naive in my view to think the SNP really think this proposal can actually be implemented in practice.
Funny how the people who insist that the SNP must be open to criticism get upset when the same principle is applied to the party’s detractors. Apparently, it’s entirely a one-way process. Anybody is allowed to say anything they like about the SNP, no matter how unfair or even untrue, but attempt to refute the slurs and calumnies and you’re immediate denounced as a mindless party loyalist. It’s OK to attack the SNP. But don’t anybody dare try to defend them.
So eager were you to castigate me for daring to suggest that the SNP might not be quite as bad as the British nationalist caricature suggests that you entirely missed the point of my comment. Which was not about the viability or otherwise of the Scottish Government’s proposals but the insistence that the proposals themselves are “dishonest”. If you ever get around to taking account of what I actually said, maybe you’ll have something relevant to add to it.
You’re right about one thing, though. It certainly would be “pretty naive” to think the SNP really think this proposal can actually be implemented in practice. It would be even more foolish to assume that I am so naive. You see, I ask questions. I question everything. I don’t just do knee-jerk reactions.For example, I question whether it is even sensible to state that the Scottish Government’s proposals are reasonable, allow that they are not quite entirely impossible and acknowledge that they are “politically savvy” but then label them “dishonest”. It is not at all clear that any proposal can be all four of these things simultaneously.
The reality is that it doesn’t matter whether the proposal is feasible or not. It had to be put forward anyway – for reasons that really should need to be explained again. To dismiss this as “posturing” is to fail to recognise that the political gesture is not the same as gesture politics. Political gestures can be hugely significant. After all, ‘posturing’ is simply a pejorative term for taking a position. And, at the risk of being thoughtlessly labelled a ‘sycophant’, I’ll applaud the SNP for doing so.
“Funny how the people who insist that the SNP must be open to criticism get upset when the same principle is applied to the party’s detractors.”
And who is upset here? I noted that you have a tendency to attack people for spreading “British nationalist propaganda” (your words) whenever they criticise the SNP. I don’t think it does your argument any favours. You’ve responded to my comment in the classic fashion of assuming I must be sitting around dreaming up reasons to hate the SNP 24/7, when in fact I have no more complaints about the SNP than I do about any other British political party (far fewer gripes, in fact, than I do with Labour, the Tories, and UKIP for a start). But I exercised an ounce of scepticism about their motives so I’m immediately “one of them”.
You see this sort of behaviour all over the internet and it doesn’t help your or my cause (assuming we both have the aim of keeping Scotland in the EU or as closely integrated with the EU as possible). You’re making an enemy of people who are on the same side of the debate simply because your allegiances to a political party put them beyond criticism.
And I addressed your point about dishonesty directly. I said the SNP are no more dishonest than any other party in how they’ve approached this issue, but that they’re clearly using the issue as a springboard for political support. I don’t see much point in arguing semantics about the word we use to describe that – in fact anyone familiar with the history of the SNP’s policies on Europe for the last 20 years would know this is how they’ve always used the EU, namely as a platform to portray the party as civic nationalist/internationalist in opposition to the inward-looking and regressive British nationalism embodied by the Eurosceptic wing of the Tories.
Didn’t take long to get to the straw man argument. I do not “attack people” for criticising the SNP. I question the criticism. I scrutinise it. Because I am firmly of the opinion that one should question everything in politics with the utmost rigour.
It is not scepticism about the SNP that I take exception to, but selective scepticism of any kind.
It is a simple fact that the vast majority of the attacks on the SNP collapse under such scrutiny. If you’re not the sort of dullard who insists that ‘they’re all the same’ because you’re too intellectually stunted and/or indolent to properly analyse and differentiate, then it is plain to see why it should be that the SNP is the target of such a disproportionate amount of malicious propaganda. The very fact that, as the de facto political arm of Scotland’s independence movement, the party is regarded as an existential threat by the entire British state should be explanation enough.
If someone comes to regard me as their “enemy” just because I dare to question the basis of attacks on the SNP, then I cannot help but be serenely untroubled by the loss off such a dubious ally. This is particularly true in the case of one so shallow as to take the view that objecting to politically motivated lies and smears can only possibly be motivated blind partisan allegiance.
By way of a clarification that I accept is unlikely to penetrate the barriers of your prejudice, my overriding political allegiance is to the cause of restoring Scotland’s rightful constitutional status, with all that this implies for realising the potential to be a better, fairer more prosperous nation. The political party that you so foolishly imagine I owe some extraordinary loyalty is, in reality, no more than a means to that end. It is but a tool. An essential tool, to be sure. But a mere tool nonetheless. Maybe next year Santa will bring you a sense of perspective.
As to your insistence that it doesn’t matter what word(s) we use to describe a phenomenon, I refer you to this short passage from Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking-Glass,
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
You are NOT the master of words.
When you read comment like this, that totally fails to understand Nicola Sturgeon following the will of people in Scotland, you realize why the establishments and media all over the world are all over the place.
Other examples of the disparaging tone of the article are the use of the word “murky” to describe the logical need to devolve a raft of new powers in order to make the arrangements work and the invention of terms like “para-diplomacy” which is as bad as “pretendy” but attempts to imply something more “intellectual” and less insulting.
I can’t disagree with the meat of the argument presented but I too have to question the labeling of the SNPs position as dishonest. In the context of a UK government with Brexit plans that can varyingly be described as non-existent to (also) almost impossible to implement, surely it wouldn’t be beyond the pale to suggest the mere existence of the Scottish Govt’s plans is a beacon of clarity and honesty in comparison?