The EU has been popularly derided as ineffectual, but it has shown remarkable co-ordination and unity in its Brexit negotiations with the UK. Dermot Hodson and John Peterson explain how Michel Barnier has outflanked the UK, with both the Commission and the Council presenting a united front.
Before British voters went to the polls in June 2016, the institutions of the European Union (EU) were dismissed as ‘sclerotic, over-centralised and undemocratic’. Those same EU institutions are now portrayed as running rings around British negotiators. Here we find another – amongst many – of Brexit’s ironies.
This state of affairs stems from popular misunderstanding in the UK, as well as elsewhere, of how EU institutions actually work. It also reflects the fact that Brexit is a challenge to which EU institutions are better suited than their British counterparts. The loss of two senior Cabinet members days after the Cabinet agreed on a new negotiating position makes British political institutions’ deficiencies all too clear.
Theresa May’s decision to put David Davis in charge of a new Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in July 2016 helped to contain cabinet tensions in the immediate aftermath of the referendum. But it also weakened the UK’s negotiating position. Creating new government departments is not something that Whitehall tends to do well and DExEU has struggled to recruit and retain suitably qualified staff. It has had two Permanent Secretaries in two years.
Davis styled himself as a happy warrior in leading the British negotiating team. But his working relationship with the Prime Minister and EU counterparts was strained. He visited Dublin just once in his role as Brexit secretary. Remarkably, Davis spent just four hours in talks with the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, in the first half of 2018. At home, rumours that Davis might resign re-surfaced regularly, until he finally quit. His departure and that of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson a day later could still yet generate momentum to topple the Prime Minister.
Johnson knows better than most British politicians how EU institutions work. His father was once an official at the European Commission and even wrote a novel (which became a film) about a fictionalised Commissioner. Johnson Jr.’s understanding of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) turned out to be less assured. His tenure as Foreign Secretary was marked by multiple gaffes on the international stage and a bit part on the European one. In spite of its vast experience in EU matters, the FCO has been sidelined in Brexit negotiations by DExEU and Downing Street. So much so, in fact, that Davis publicly questioned why Boris Johnson had resigned over the Cabinet’s new negotiating position when Brexit wasn’t ‘central’ to the Foreign Secretary’s job.
EU institutions are far from perfect. They can appear remote and rigid. They have an infuriating habit of delaying crucial decisions until confronted with a sense of impending doom. And yet, by the standards of international diplomacy, the EU is both efficient and democratic. No other international organization has a democratically elected parliament nor one that carries more weight than many national legislatures. None wields the same influence that the EU does at home or abroad with such clear rules for doing so and across such a wide range of policies.
The secret to EU institutions’ success so far in Brexit negotiations has been member states’ willingness to entrust responsibility to the European Commission. Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which sets out the steps through which an EU member state can leave, gives the Council of Ministers leeway to decide who should be the Union’s negotiator. Reports of a power struggle between the Commission and the Council over this role proved unfounded. The Commission quickly appointed Michel Barnier as its chief Brexit negotiator. EU leaders have always been clear that Barnier speaks for the EU-27 as a collective.
Considered by some to be a controversial choice, Barnier proved to be a smart one. Having gained a good understanding of the Northern Ireland peace process during his tenure as European Commissioner for Regional Policy, the EU’s chief negotiator was quick to grasp the economic and political repercussions of establishing a hard border on the island of Ireland. He has worked closely with the Irish government to address their concerns. Barnier has always made clear that there can be no backsliding on a backstop to prevent border checks between Ireland and Northern Ireland after Brexit.
The British government has also found it difficult to gain traction in the EU’s most powerful institution: the European Council. This difficulty is not simply a matter of chemistry (or lack thereof) between Theresa May and other EU leaders. It reflects the fact that the UK, as soon as it voted to leave the EU, was excluded from the European Council’s deliberative working methods. Meeting informally among themselves since 2016, the heads of state or government of the EU-27 (that is: all EU member states except the UK) have spoken with one voice on Brexit. The European Council, meanwhile, has severely restricted the time devoted to Brexit, making it difficult for Theresa May to bypass formal talks between her government and the European Commission.
EU institutions’ ‘transformation’ from bloated bureaucracy to a lean, mean negotiation machine may be an irony, but is a bitter one – for three reasons.
- First, it provides further evidence of how the UK’s vote to leave the EU was premised, in part, on a popular misunderstanding of how the EU works.
- Second, the UK’s struggles to engage with withdrawal negotiations may strengthen the EU’s negotiating hand. But they will leave both sides worse off if a hard Brexit ensues.
- Third, the unity of purpose that EU institutions have shown over Brexit is lacking on other pressing policy challenges, most notably over migration, eurozone reform and democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary. EU institutions may be having a good Brexit, but this result gives Europe no grounds for complacency.
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Note: This article originally appeared at our sister site, LSE Brexit. It gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics.
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Dermot Hodson – Birkbeck College
Dermot Hodson is Reader in Political Economy at Birkbeck College.
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John Peterson – University of Edinburgh
John Peterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Together they edit The Institutions of the European Union, now in its fourth edition, having previously been edited by John Peterson and Michael Shackleton.
The entire structure of this piece is wrong and completely misrepresents the actions of the EU. There has been a complete non-action response from EU side embodied in simple replies of ‘No’ with no attempt at negotiation. Hardy ‘negotiating rings round’ anybody but simply flaccidly waiting for the next rejection.
The EU published its aims early in the process and has produced numerous documents on the key topics so representing their position as one of simple inaction isn’t credible. The UK in contrast took over two years of infighting to produce a coherent position and even that is now being rejected by a fair chunk of Conservatives.
A more worthwhile debating topic would be whether the EU’s success in bringing the UK closer to its position is down to negotiating strategy, or simply the result of the UK’s fundamental weakness in the negotiation from the outset. It could be argued that anyone could have achieved what the EU has so far: the UK’s position was completely impossible as leaving without a deal would cause huge problems for the government politically (and the country economically) yet the promises made by the leave campaign (end free movement, maintain free trade with the EU, sign new trade agreements with the rest of the world, no border in Ireland, no ECJ jurisdiction, complete control over domestic laws, no payments to the EU budget, etc.) couldn’t be delivered on.
The EU has known all along that the UK government needs a deal and that it would have to compromise. I’m not sure we can claim Barnier has played a blinder simply because the inevitable is now happening.
Absolutely nothing inevitable about it. Had someone who believed in Brexit being negotiating it should have been a different story.
Mrs May still believes Brexit is a bad idea and her approach has been to try and mitigate what she sees as a threat.
Instead, we should have set out our stall from the beginning. The EU has a massive trade surplus with us and a no deal will damage them far more than us. This is the first point. Secondly, both the government’s lawyers and those of the EU agreed that legally once we leave we aren’t committed to giving them a penny.
All this talk about research and schemes such as Erasmus ignore the fact that almost all of these already have partners from outwith the EU.
I’ve even seen comment that we will lose access to CERN which is an obvious nonsense seeing it’s not even located in an EU member country!
As for Ireland, the border is already a currency and excise border. If we control tobacco and alcohol already without a hard border what is the problem? The common travel area has worked fine since 1923, long before the EU was in existence.
As for a free trade deal. the EU is committed to signing as many free trade deals as possible. None of their agreements demand the four principles.
If both parties negotiated in good faith there is a win-win position. It appears however that the EU are intent on playing politics no matter how much it damages member countries. The danger is that, as they are already losing a major contributor, the markets may view such behaviour as unacceptable and the Euro may come under pressure.
The UK’s negotiating stance has, from a position of power, been appalling. The EU has simply refused to engage!
On the first point, we do a larger proportion of our trade with the EU than they do with us and imports aren’t “lost money”, they include things like food and materials that play a role in our supply chain. The idea that having a trade deficit buys us influence with the EU has never, at any stage, been taken seriously by the EU, it’s actually just a campaign line that the Leave side used to try and win the referendum by pretending the negotiation would be easy (which it clearly hasn’t been).
The “other countries have trade agreements and don’t have to follow the four principles” argument is based on conflating low-level trade deals with the kind of advanced level of free trade that is provided via the single market. The EU has never said it would avoid having a free trade agreement with the UK, but that will take several years to negotiate, will provide far less “free trade” than membership of the single market, and would rule out many of the elements UK businesses are lobbying May to secure. The EU’s position is actually that you can have some kind of low-level free trade agreement in the future, but you can’t have an advanced agreement of the kind Norway and Switzerland have without following the rules (as they do).
The loss of the UK’s budget contributions provoking some second Eurozone crisis is also a pretty fanciful notion. The size of the EU budget is tiny in real terms (it’s intended to be 1% of EU GDP) and our own contribution is a fraction of that. Most of it can be accounted for by simply altering the scope of funding programmes and will have no wider impact on anything beyond that.
If I may say (and I should say I make these points in the spirit of a fair discussion – I don’t do personal insults on the internet and I’ve no doubt you’re a reasonable person), I do think these three points are quite illustrative of many of the problems with the Leave approach: a misguided sense of UK power (based on illogical principles such as the trade deficit argument); a failure to recognise the difference between basic free trade agreements and sophisticated mechanisms for reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade; and a narrowing in on contributions to the budget, which is arguably one of the least significant elements in this entire debate (again, the only reason this issue is given such prominence in the UK is because it suited anti-EU campaigners to focus on it, knowing fine well that the apparent scandal of “our money going to other countries” is a powerful campaigning tool).
We should now leave the deal on the table and make it clear there will be no further concessions but that if they come up with productive proposals we will re-engage. It s now time to go but make it clear no money.