David Henig / Sep 2024
Photo: Shutterstock
Even life’s biggest optimists tend to be rather gloomy about the state of the world right now. There feels to be an almost perfect storm of security and economic concerns, whether that is Russia, the Middle East, or China, coupled with a partial or worse withdrawal into insularity of Europe’s long-standing partner, the US.
Internally, Europe’s politics also faces nationalist and populist pressures, in which immigration and the economy play a major part. Quite clearly there is a need for growth, that these developments also threaten. Maintaining Europe’s lifestyles and quality of life feels ever harder.
Turning inwards is always a tempting response at times like this, but not one that would seem to offer a good solution. Europe’s prosperity, that supports our living standards, is built upon global competitiveness. Putting up walls will leave the rest of the world for others, if that was even possible when our leading companies want and need to operate globally.
Equally, this cannot be to turn the clock back on environmental or social regulation, for that is also a part of what helped bring prosperity in a single market, not to mention being crucial to our futures. Building a strong internal market which was also variably open to neighbours and wider partners rested on economics, openness, and effective regulation.
Language becomes a giveaway for the current European political state of mind, in that we talk more of protection than opportunity, and find cause to be suspicion in almost every external engagement. This in turn leads to new layers of regulation and barriers, even internal ones, that weaken the overall position.
Nothing demonstrates Europe’s fraught political mindset more than a tangled UK-EU relationship that neither side really wants to talk about. 2016’s referendum vote and its aftermath in Brussels and London can really be seen as the first serious warning of what was to come, as successive UK governments embraced populism and fantasy, and the EU declared it didn’t care.
As with many divorces, a lot of bad things were said in the heat of the moment, with neither side blameless. There are still EU officials shuddering at UK negotiating tactics, which proved totally short-sighted, but there is distrust on both sides.
Unlike traditional separations, the UK and EU are still bound together by geography and a substantial joint relationship. Our energy security as we move to net zero is intimately bound up in North Sea wind, defence against Russian expansionism requires collective effort, and it is madness to take a one trillion Euro trade relationship for granted.
So much of what has been said about post-Brexit relations has been profoundly unhelpful, such as “you left, get over it”, “we don’t need a deal”, or “let’s just rejoin”. There can be no turning the clock back to 2016, and any process of rapprochement is inevitably going to take time and patience. There are no instant solutions that will be widely acceptable all round.
Finally, the UK has a government which accepts international realities, after the July election of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. One can easily criticise his caution, but that was what won him an overwhelming mandate. On the EU side there will soon be a new Commission, but the same lead individual, Maroš Šefčovič, tasked by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to “strengthen relations with the UK on areas of shared interest”.
This opportunity for a reset was my encouragement to write a new paper for ECIPE, “Negotiating Uncertainty in UK-EU Relations: Past, Present, and Future”. As someone who works on relevant topics in both London and Brussels, speaks with folk on both sides, and has experience on the inside of EU-third country negotiations I also felt that there were things that needed to be said about how this could happen. In particular, the need to learn from the past but change how things are done in the future.
On the UK side, that change is to accept the realities of modern negotiations, in which the internal discussions to adopt objectives are the most important, and where both this and the external negotiation take place to a degree in public. That is a process the EU has arguably mastered, but less impressive has been Brussels’ attempts to understand how such a large neighbouring relationship should be structured, long a problem also with regard to Switzerland and other major neighbours.
For both the EU and UK there is a need to recognise properly this exceptionally wide scope, in which there are almost too many issues of cooperation to list. Security, competitiveness and energy are obvious shared interests, each containing numerous details, to which we could easily add mobility, migration, regulation of new technology such as AI, third country relationships, criminal justice, and so the list could go on.
One easy answer then as to why improve relations between EU and UK is that both sides will have to spend time thinking about these issues, so why not do this in a collaborative manner that aims to make improvements. Developing this line further, arguably there are few relationships in which attitudes are held more in common than this one, such as to the challenges of net zero.
Another good reason to improve relations is that conversely we know that negotiations on individual subjects are always difficult, which means the asks of both the EU and UK could lead to tensions. Processes to handle these will allow both sides to achieve more of that they seek, and there’s more than enough asks to do this for some time. Similar to EU-Switzerland talks, this could even be something that helps to rebuild European confidence.
Because ultimately the reasons for wanting to improve UK-EU relations should be the core ones of improving the prospects for security and prosperity, which are problems faced across Europe. Those who believe in shared endeavour to deliver better results, which by definition must include the EU and fortunately now also include UK government ministers, must want to see better international relations.
In a difficult environment, the state of UK-EU relations offers an opportunity over the next five years. That has to mean learning from the past in finding new ways forward that respect but advance both sides.
