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Whisper it, but there might be light at the end of the #Brexit tunnel according to the Sun. But will a UK-EU free trade deal be able to stand the test of time? Or, for that matter, is a no deal outcome a sustainable endpoint for UK-EU relations? A thread https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13216076/david-frost-brussels-trade-deal-next-week/
By coincidence I have a new open access article @BritJPIR looking at the sustainability of post-Brexit UK-EU relations in terms of three options: soft Brexit, a free deal, and no deal https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1369148120968516#articleShareContainer
The argument is that the stability of the UK-EU relationship after Brexit is dependent on the operation of what @rdanielkelemen dubs “federal” safeguards. See his brilliant Built to Last? The Durability of EU Federalism http://aei.pitt.edu/7932/1/kelemen-r-07a.pdf
Kelemen identifies structural, judicial, partisan, and socio-cultural safeguards as a means for balancing centrifugal and centripetal forces between national capitals and Brussels. So how might these function for the UK-EU relationship after January 2021?
We know for a start that the UK wants a less institutionalized relationship i.e. fewer binding commitments with the EU, even if this carries economic costs according to the UK government’s own modelling. This leaves a spectrum of options with a FTA is in-between both extremes
A hard, no-deal Brexit means no new legal commitments to the EU that need to be sustained within party politics or public opinion generally. But would that be the end of the matter? Not really.
No-deal Brexit creates space for continuing political contestation because of the need to justify this more economically costly outcome. Why not do a deal with the EU? Why prioritize trade with other countries? The sovereignty debate won’t go away in a no-deal scenario.
The big advantage of a UK-EU FTA is that it can attenuate the sovereignty debate. Negotiating such a deal triangulates UK voters’ majority preference for a new trade treaty while respecting UK voters’ antipathy towards free movement as shown by fab @Vasilopoulou_S
So if there’s a UK-EU FTA will it be plain sailing ever after? Hardly. This kind of Brexit is about managing UK-EU divergence, but in a context where the UK’s ability to influence EU decisions is extremely limited.
If UK-EU differences can’t be solved by arbitration, the EU as the bigger economy has a far greater ability to impose costs on the UK via countermeasures and absorb costs of any UK trade retaliation. Look at what happened when Swiss voters tried to restrict EU migration…
Thus a UK-EU FTA will work best if the UK moderates its future demands for diverging from EU norms. On past performance, this is a tall order. The reason #Brexit happened is because of the UK’s appetite for differentiation. @EU3Dh2020 @ResearchDi
As an EU member state, the UK had very strong institutional and judicial safeguards for its interests. But these weren’t enough to counterbalance a party system that kept asking for exceptions and stoking public resentment of EU obligations https://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/sage/journals/content/bpia/0/bpia.ahead-of-print/1369148120968516/20201115/images/large/10.1177_1369148120968516-table1.jpeg
In other words, even if there is a deal, the UK will have replaced an institutionally and judicially robust relationship with a far weaker one more subject to political turmoil on both sides. Interesting times ahead! Might be of interest @BrigidLaffan @MonikaMeislova @Usherwood
