Germany and Brexit

Abstract

This chapter argues that key consequences for Germany's role within EU politics, which can be linked to Brexit, started to materialize already in the second decade of the 2000s, thus, before the actual departure of the UK. The Brexit negotiations were a prominent example of Germany's contemporary EU policy: if pressed hard, German governing elites choose EU unity over unilateralism or, in this case, exclusive bilateral deals or alignments with the UK. Brexit thus is predicted to affect Germany's role in EU governance and the country's attempts in shaping the EU's political and legal order along the lines of more recent trends in EU politics. Issues such as potential German hegemony in EU politics, the country's close alignment with other major powers within the EU, such as France, as well as Germany's individual relations with the UK have to be considered mainly in the light of major recent events in EU integration other than Brexit.