Behind the Brexit Chaos: A Faulty U.K. Negotiating Strategy
Behind the Brexit Chaos: A Faulty U.K. Negotiating Strategy
LONDON—When British politicians launched Brexit negotiations after the country’s 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union, they were confident they could win a special deal by finding allies among the 27 remaining members of the bloc.
The strategy misfired, as underlined by Prime Minister Theresa May’s apparently futile effort in Brussels on Thursday to persuade other leaders to sweeten a withdrawal agreement that has aroused widespread opposition among her own Conservative Party lawmakers.
If London sought to divide and rule in Europe—an echo of its historic balance-of-power strategy in continental affairs—it has been met with a unity that has surprised both sides.
Diplomats and officials from the U.K. and EU believe Mrs. May’s government made important tactical mistakes in the talks. But they say that the root of British miscalculation was the failure to understand that a country leaving the bloc would be treated by its 27 counterparts fundamentally unlike one—even an awkward customer like Britain—that was inside.
Britain’s new outsider status is why, to British indignation, the bloc has prioritized the interests of a small country—Ireland—over the U.K.’s on the sensitive question of the Irish border.
“We are stuck in this mind-set that we ought to be treated as a member state,” said Ivan Rogers, the former British ambassador to the EU who resigned over differences with Mrs. May’s government in January 2017. A partner inside the bloc, he says, naturally becomes a rival and competitor outside it.
David Phinnemore, professor of European politics at Queen’s University, Belfast, said London failed to understand where the EU was coming from. “At the level of politicians, I don’t think there was an appreciation or an understanding of the EU’s position,” he said.
He said the EU’s negotiating stance derived three central principles from the bloc’s negotiations with Switzerland more than 30 years ago.
The EU would prioritize its own integration over the interests of any non-EU “third country”; it wouldn’t allow third countries to decide what was permitted to happen inside the EU; and rights of access to the EU’s markets and institutions would be balanced by obligations.
Under this third principle, Mrs. May’s insistence that the U.K. would stop freedom of movement of labor after Brexit meant that it couldn’t at the same time be inside the EU’s single market, as non-EU Norway is.
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May narrowly survived a no-confidence vote triggered by lawmakers of her own party over her handling of Brexit. WSJ Brexit Editor Stephen Fidler explains why securing a deal has been so chaotic.
London embarked on the talks with a more transactional approach. It expected to appeal over the heads of Brussels-based negotiators to industrial interests in other countries, particularly Germany.
British politicians expected that German manufacturing industry’s desperation for continued unimpeded access to the British market would push Chancellor Angela Merkel into giving Britain special access to the bloc’s single market.
Instead, Ms. Merkel and other EU leaders prioritized the balance of rights and obligations in that single market, calculating that giving the U.K. privileged access would provide incentives for other countries to seek the same deal.
In fact, from the start the EU saw itself as holding whip hand in the talks, convinced that a failure, while bad for both sides, would be worse for the Brits. Their reasoning was based on a huge economic imbalance: While 45% of British exports go to the EU, only two EU countries, Ireland and Cyprus, send more than 10% of their exports to the U.K.
The U.K. also anticipated it could appeal to traditional allies in Northern Europe, like Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. Inside the EU they had together championed the values of free markets and open trade. But once the U.K. left, a different dynamic took over.
One issue the U.K. missed was that some of these governments were also faced with euroskepticism and political concerns about EU overreach.
In the turmoil immediately after the 2016 Brexit referendum, Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands, one of the most like-minded countries, said the U.K. had just “collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.”
Mr. Rutte, facing the political fight of his life against the right-wing populism of Geert Wilders, had a fundamental political interest in ensuring that Brexit turned out to be an anti-model for how to handle angst about Brussels. The Dutch leader echoed that point on Thursday.
“If anyone in the Netherlands thinks Nexit is a good idea, look at England and see the huge damage it’s done,” he said.
The U.K. also missed that it would come to be seen as a rival. Some Northern European countries have many cutting-edge small exporters who worried that an U.K. outside the EU would undercut them in international markets and in the EU if Britain retained easy access to the bloc’s markets.
Mrs. May’s so-called Chequers proposal in July 2018, which aimed at keeping the U.K. in the EU’s single market for goods but able to sign free-trade agreements with the U.S. and others, was viewed on the continent as a blueprint for the U.K. becoming an EU offshore-manufacturing assembly platform.
“It’s always going to be a relationship now of tension and not just partnership, because our interests are diverging from theirs and we are seeking to derive deliberate advantage from having left,” Mr. Rogers said. “We can’t expect them not to react.”
London also thought it could rely on the states of Eastern Europe, whose EU membership the U.K. had championed. But some of them—deeply embedded in Germany’s manufacturing supply chains—had a lot at stake in defending the single market.
Many of those governments were also conflicted as hundreds of thousands of their most enterprising young citizens had left home to flock to opportunities in Britain. If some of them returned, Brexit might for these counties have a silver lining.
Write to Stephen Fidler at stephen.fidler@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
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