As he attended the UK’s last Brussels council meeting this week, Britain’s Europe minister Christopher Pincher offered a heady vision of his country’s future partnership with the EU after Brexit, declaring they would stand shoulder-to-shoulder as “sovereign equals”.
The reality, warn diplomats and officials, will be quite different. They say Brexit will herald a crushing reversal in Britain’s influence across broad realms of European policymaking, after decades in which the UK managed to wield exceptional clout despite its often-ambivalent attitude towards Brussels.
With UK prime minister Boris Johnson vowing to deviate from EU regulation even as he seeks a trade deal with the bloc, some European politicians predict the two are on course to become hard-bitten economic competitors, rather than close partners.
“A geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry is about to start — even if they couch the relationship using nice, friendly, diplomatic language,” said Pascal Lamy, the EU’s former trade commissioner and subsequent chief of the World Trade Organization. “This will put both sides under pressure.”
Until now the UK has been accustomed to holding impressive sway in EU affairs. Frans Timmermans, one of the commission’s executive vice-presidents, said it had arguably proven to be the most effective operator in steering Europe’s economic development.
“In shaping EU policy, the United Kingdom has been spectacularly successful — at least in the period I can oversee, which is the last 30 years,” he told the Financial Times last month.
Emotional MEPs hold ‘Always united’ scarves at the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday © Yves Herman/AP
From next week, however, British ministers will be shut out of meetings like the one Mr Pincher attended, members of the European Parliament will have surrendered their identity cards and cleared their offices, British judges will have retreated from the EU courts, and UK diplomats will no longer be permitted to wander freely through Brussels corridors.
Policies that will continue to impact the UK’s economic destiny will be forged without British input.
To advocates of Brexit, this withdrawal is a necessary part of taking back control of UK regulatory policy and decision making.
To current and former officials operating within the EU capital, it marks a regrettable reversal for a country that helped to push the EU towards deeper economic integration, market liberalisation, freer trade and enlargement towards the east.
“[Britain’s influence] is going to be much diminished: you are not at the table,” said David Wright, a former commission official who is now a consultant at the advisory business Flint Global.
Although the UK sat out the creation of the single currency — the boldest EU project of recent decades — Mr Lamy said the bloc was “economically much more UK-like” than when Britain joined in the 1970s.
“They had a big influence on liberalisation, economic opening, increasing market efficiencies in the EU. But they have also been a constant brake on political integration, resisting integration in social areas, tax areas, and of course in defence.”
The creation of the single market was led by commission president Jacques Delors, pictured, but supported by Margaret Thatcher © Keystone/Getty Images
The most prominent reflection of the UK’s economic advocacy was the creation of the single market, which was led by commission president Jacques Delors but supported by Margaret Thatcher.
Even as her private secretary Charles Powell privately counselled a policy of “Community bashing”, Mrs Thatcher backed harmonisation and the removal of non-tariff barriers.
The UK was also an enthusiastic advocate of EU enlargement in the 2000s, and a prime mover in shaping its financial regulatory regime. Former officials cited the development of the EU’s competition and trade frameworks, influenced among others by Britain’s commissioner Leon Brittan during the late 1980s and 1990s.
The UK’s clout suffered a blow with the financial crisis, which damaged the free-market, light-touch philosophy promoted by the British. But the domestic mood in the UK also began to weigh on its activities in the EU realm; one senior EU official spoke of an increasing tendency of UK prime ministers to come seeking minor public relations victories at EU summits in a bid to please the Eurosceptic British press.
The UK’s weight in European politics also suffered a setback with David Cameron’s decision to pull the Conservatives out of the pan-EU European People’s party.
The notion that the UK was failing to wield its economic power in Brussels became increasingly prevalent in recent years, in part because of setbacks under Mr Cameron. The UK was twice as likely to be outvoted in the Council from 2009 to 2015 compared with any other member state — a far higher rate than during the period between 2004 and 2009 — according to analysis from academics Sara Hagemann and Simon Hix.
Mr Cameron also failed to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as commission president, unsuccessfully attempted to water down a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and was outmanoeuvred by other EU leaders when he tried to haggle over, and then veto, new fiscal rules in 2011. His renegotiation of the UK’s EU membership ahead of the 2016 vote for Brexit yielded small victories on migrants’ rights to claim child benefit, and on financial services, but was sufficiently flimsy that he barely referred to it in the referendum campaign.
Today UK politicians are hoping one of the dividends from Brexit will be an ability to be more nimble in new policy areas — freed from the laborious process of EU lawmaking.
David Cameron, left, failed to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as commission president © Thierry Roge/EPA
But the UK could also find the world a lonelier place. Many European leaders now see the UK as an emerging economic rival, which is why they are determined to curtail its ability to diverge in key areas of regulation and still strike a trade agreement by the end of the year.
The EU is under internal pressure to take a tougher — and potentially more protectionist — approach in its economic relations with rival powers such as China and the US. At the same time the US is pulling back from international bodies including the World Trade Organization, under the influence of a president who sees global relations in transactional terms.
“The question for the EU is whether the UK is about to become a competitor on its doorstep, rather than the close partner it used to be,” said Ms Hagemann.
Source: Economy - ft.com
