World economy

The process: Brexit as “directed by Hitchcock”?

If indeed it had been “Hitchcock who directed Brexit”, as Donald Tusk remarked in a humorous tweet, it would hardly have been directed without a plot - nor plotted without direction. One year past the UK-referendum and weeks after delivery of the notification, nothing indicates the strategy of a mastermind behind what is happening. With the goal and the course of negotiations in total obscurity, the EU has been forced to wait “until the dust in the UK settles”(Juncker 2017) before being able to deal with the - everything but negligible task - of coping

with and to organizing the leave process.³ The departure adds volatility amidst a situation of global turbulence (Ansell et al. 2016; Burrows and Gnad 2012). Since Theresa May's speech at Lancaster House on 17 January 2017, and confirmed with the passing of the Brexit Bill in parliament on 14 March, it had at least been clear that the UK was intending to leave the single market and the customs union in the process and to negotiate a tailor-made agreement based on the UK’s demands. With the June election, the “what kind of Brexit” question appears to
be on the table again, not to mention how to prepare and execute it. At the date of writing, it is not foreseeable how long May can stay as PM and if the minority government supported by DUP will last, which in turn leaves a theoretical possibility of another change of direction as far as the Brexit negotiations are concerned.

According to the EU Treaty (TEU), an agreement between the EU and the UK has to be signed within two years from triggering the exit clause, i.e. by 31^st March, 2019. If the negotiating period is not extended by unanimous vote of the member states in the Council, there will be less than two years available, just about 18 months as the divorce agreement needs to be ratified by the European Parliament and the parliaments of the 27 EU states (Renwick 2017). The time to avoid a disorderly break-up without a contract will be even shorter given that substantial talks started only after the formation of a new government in London. It is unlikely that all points can be settled comprehensively and in a manner satisfactory to both sides in this timeframe. In the short term, the two-phased procedure suggested by the EC anticipates to focus on the core-issues of EU-UK relations, residents’ rights and the Brexit-bill to reach a transitional agreement on Brexit. For the overwhelming majority of questions, as is standard practice with major negotiations, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Conflicts are bound to arise: whilst the UK wishes to already begin parallel trade talks with third-countries, Brussels regards this as taboo so long as the UK legally holds membership status. In view of these divergences and the intricacies of the matter, it is hard to predict how long it will take before an EU-UK trade agreement - as the core of the future relationship - is in place. The time horizon for a comprehensive settlement of open issues is assumed here to be between 5 and 10 years.

In the current minimum cooperation scenario, London announced that the country intends to continue working closely with the EU on security and defence matters, while it is determined to go it alone on almost everything else. Also, May’s trigger-letter underlined the “deep and special partnership” the UK seeks to maintain after leaving the Union, and becoming its “closest friend and neighbour” (UK Government 2017a). Increasingly, and in the EU context especially, foreign policy is closely linked to the whole array of transnational public policy, such as development cooperation, trade and investment policy, multilateral negotiation processes, ranging from security and crisis management, global economic governance, climate change to research and technology, education, health, gender and other sectoral polices - as is the case of the EU DC and the European neighbourhood policy (Henökl 2017a).

Discussions on whether and how strongly sustainable development should be coupled to security and migration policy are highly controversial. Evidently, the political framing of the transformations taking place in and around Europe are reinforcing the linkage between these topics. The effects can be seen in a step change regarding asylum and migration policy, in the securitisation of border management and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), in the lowered ambitions for democracy promotion, and in the instrumentalisation of partner countries as outposts of a new European realpolitik. The EU-Turkey refugee deal is a current and strikingly obvious example of how lacking in credibility, vulnerable and ultimately dependent this strategy has left Europe.