Would the EU refuse to spend any more time negotiating?

There is a widespread view in Britain that Brexit took up so much of the EU’s time and energy that it has little appetite to enter into new rounds of negotiation with the UK, whether it is for rejoining or even just amending the Brexit deal.

As Labour peer and former minister Peter Mandelson put it in March 2024: “Re-open a negotiation? You’ve got to be joking. They [the EU] have got other priorities. They have other fish to fry now.

“They’re not going to go through the back-and-forth, up-and-down, seesaw motion; or another protracted, probably hard fought over, and indecisive negotiation with Britain. So that’s simply answered.”

However, his claim does not match up with the EU’s actions in recent years.

The EU committed major negotiation resources to ameliorating the problems of the Northern Ireland Protocol, in the form of the Windsor Framework, agreed in February 2023 after two years of negotiations. Where many commentators expected the EU to show rigidity in enforcing the Protocol as written, the EU negotiators ultimately showed flexibility and pragmatism to try to solve the (primarily political) problems that the deal had encountered in Northern Ireland.

The negotiations never ended

The agreement of the Windsor Framework in turn unlocked the possibility of UK associate membership of Horizon, the EU’s scientific research programme. The EU – which, remember, people are claiming has no appetite for negotiation – negotiated a “bespoke deal” for the UK’s Horizon membership.

In April 2024 the European Commission made its initial proposal for an EU-UK youth mobility scheme, which would have allowed both Brits and EU citizens aged 18-30 to live, work and study across the EU and UK for four years. This may have been aimed at avoiding the UK making country-by-country deals, and then-prime minister Rishi Sunak was quick to reject the proposal. Regardless, if the UK had been receptive to the proposal, the EU stood ready to negotiate it. (In fact, the EU continues to try to negotiate it as part of the 'Brexit reset'.)

After the British general election of July 2024, Germany made it known that it would like to “turn the British prime minister’s proposed security pact into a veritable Brexit mega deal: encompassing everything from agricultural rules to the Erasmus student exchange program”. Again, this does not seem to indicate a lack of time or energy to negotiate.

More recently, the new government's 'Brexit reset' is part of an extensive period of negotiations which are set to continue for some time before coming to any conclusions.

Everyday negotiators

The EU has extensive experience of negotiation, from the day-to-day work of negotiating its policy positions between 27 countries, its commissioners and over 700 MEPs, to its external negotiations with almost every country in the world. Unlike Britain, which realised during the Brexit process that it had a “shortage of experienced UK trade negotiators”, the EU employs as many professional negotiators as it requires and its leadership conducts a wide array of negotiations constantly. It does not get through one large negotiation and then ignore a country for an extended period because it has “bigger fish to fry”.

Also, we should acknowledge that the UK is – from the EU’s perspective – still quite a large fish. Now that the UK is external to the EU, it has become the EU’s second-largest trading partner after the US.

Brexit itself is a continuing negotiation on hundreds of topics

In any case, the Brexit deal is not a one-and-done settlement that avoids any need for negotiations. Issues continue to arise regularly that need to be resolved. To take one example, the EU and UK had to renegotiate rules-of-origin requirements for electric vehicles, which had been due to take effect at the start of 2024, extending the existing rules to the end of 2026. And what will happen in late 2026? It will need to be renegotiated again!

Brexit itself is a continuing negotiation on hundreds of topics - if anything, the continuation of Brexit requires more long term negotiation effort from the EU than rejoining ultimately would.

In any case, the EU is an institution founded on negotiation. Whether or not we rejoin, the EU and the UK will be negotiating and renegotiating their relationship long into the future. And if we do decide to rejoin, rest assured that there will not be a shortage of EU negotiators to handle it.

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