Withdrawal Negotiations

Abstract

This chapter provides a background overview of the EU’s legal basis for withdrawal negotiations, and the UK’s role in the EU during the period leading up to the British referendum on EU membership in 2016, focusing on the re-negotiation of the UK’s membership terms. It demonstrates how the EU responded to the British decision to leave the EU—the first time the EU was faced with a member state withdrawing from the Union—by quickly preparing for the upcoming negotiations. The EU’s negotiating agents—the Article 50 Task Force and the Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom—were established within the Commission’s headquarters, as a way of insulating them from other ongoing day-to-day business, and they were subject to control from four sets of principals—the College of Commissioners, the European Council, the Council, and the European Parliament. Through two-level game-based analyses of the negotiations leading to the Withdrawal Agreement as well as the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, insights are provided into the negotiating dynamics. The EU’s negotiating agents engaged extensively with their principals at Level Two to build domestic unity around the EU’s position. As a result of this unity, and strategic action in the international negotiations at Level One, the agents were able to reach agreements with the UK, which to a great extent reflected their own preferences.