Jake Benford explores how Labour’s election victory opens up new space for the UK to improve its relationship with the EU, whose interests have also shifted over the last decade. He argues that the UK will need to move first, but a substantial new partnership also requires flexibility, strategic ability and policy coherence from EU institutions.
The British electorate bucked two European trends last week when it delivered a strong progressive majority in the UK general election. Continental politics has seen both centre-right populism on the rise, and increased political stalemate – including in large countries like Germany and France.
Equally interesting from a continental perspective is Labour’s stated commitment to ‘reconnect’ with Europe in general, and to tackle the troubled relationship with the EU in particular. The subject has been off the agenda in Brussels and many member states ever since a Brexit-exhausted EU shifted its attention to new challenges triggered by the return of geopolitics, resulting in disruption to global supply chains, greater risk of war, geo-economic fragmentation and less growth.
Continental observers of UK politics are of course aware that the driving force behind last week’s result was not Labour’s openness towards Europe, but rather the anger of British voters at the UK’s gradual economic decline of the last 15 years. Leaving the EU did not cause, but certainly exacerbated, deep-rooted problems, notably ‘a toxic combination of low growth and high regional inequality‘.
It is therefore unsurprising that Keir Starmer’s government will prioritise kickstarting the UK economy by means of improving the trading relationship with the EU, even if it has ruled out rejoining the single market and customs union. Labour’s red lines are economically restrictive but politically understandable, given the divisions that leaving the EU trigged across UK society.
Yet, despite this renewed positivity from Labour, there is in Brussels no discernable political vision, or indeed much imagination, when it comes to reconnecting with the UK. What does exist is broad agreement among key EU officials – many of whom were part of the Brexit negotiations, during which the then-UK government appeared at times to act in bad faith – that the UK needs to move first.
Labour’s recent proposal of a ‘security pact’ (an unusual term, as no such EU instrument exists) is thus viewed with interest and openness by EU institutions – though friendly remarks on the part of Brussels’ institutions to an incoming European government should not be taken for more than diplomatic normality.
The key question is whether such an agreement will contain anything of substance (note that the UK is working hard on a bilateral security agreement with Germany, which would need to be aligned with a broader EU-UK pact), or whether it will remain a largely symbolic political exercise with little meaningful subsequent impact , designed to quickly fulfil an election pledge, while Labour works its way through the real trade-offs of re-connecting with Europe.
Independent of this, the EU’s own ambition of creating a new European security order arguably creates its very own reasons to connect with a Europe-facing UK. EU strategies to increase economic security, push forward EU enlargement and invest in strategic cooperation with ‘like-minded allies’ are high on the agenda, and are set to rise further. The UK’s large, resourceful, innovative and energy-producing economy, combined with its cultural soft-power, diplomatic clout and nuclear deterrent is without doubt an asset to EU interests in a stable political architecture across Europe.
The lack of political will described above is thus all the more problematic, though this could change with the incoming EU political leadership. The EU’s new chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has been a proponent of UK involvement in European security in the past and will be mindful of the UK’s crucial role – including early moral clarity – in supporting Eastern Europe against Russian threats.
To genuinely redesign EU-UK relations, both sides will need to quickly set common strategic priorities (indeed, there is talk of such a memorandum of understanding at the time of writing). To negotiate genuine substance, the institutional backbone of cooperation will need to be strengthened. Regular summit meetings (such as those the EU holds with Norway, Switzerland or Canada) would underline a new era of improved cooperation.
In the short term, concrete foreign and security policy cooperation could be pushed forward through specially established structures, for instance mixed working groups of officials, to tackle immediate issues such as the coordination of sanctions, cooperation on defence industrial capacities, dealing with migration and increasing energy security.
The gradual deepening and expansion of trade relations is considerably more difficult, since the TCA is a product of the EU’s legal and regulatory regime. While there is scope for flexibility, a qualitative difference between EU membership and third country status will always remain. That said, the TCA was negotiated in a different era, and the isolated treatment of economics and security appear somewhat anachronistic today.
Progress across the board will require further clarity from the UK, notably on its openness to ECJ oversight, forms of regulatory alignment and also on what its broader investment in Europe might be. But it will also require a new level of pragmatism, flexibility and political coherence on the part of the EU, which often struggles to think of security and economics as two sides of the same coin. If it wants deeper cooperation on security issues with the UK, it will likely have to show more flexibility than at present on the economic relationship. This is part of broader EU problem of holding together a regulatory, rules-based regime whilst at the same time engaging in geopolitical trade-offs.
The relationship with the UK that emerges in the long-run will certainly be of a new type, since there is no precedent for links with a like-minded former member whose trajectory remains somewhat unclear. Successfully crafting such a new model would help to underpin Brussels’ aspirations of becoming a more coherent international actor.
By Jake Benford, Senior Project Manager, Bertelsmann Stiftung.
‘Eyes on the Prize: Shifts in EU interests require a reassessment of relations with the United Kingdom’, co-authored with Daniela Schwarzer, can be found here.
