Brexit Negotiations Research Articles

The Geoeconomics of the Single Market for Financial Services

AbstractWe discuss the geoeconomics of the Single Market in financial services in the European Union (EU). We examine three case studies that concern the EU and other major jurisdictions and that range from incipient geoeconomic use to outward weaponisation of the Single Market in finance. These cases are (1) the post‐2008 crisis transatlantic tug of war, whereby the EU leveraged its Single Market vis‐à‐vis the United States, seeking to set the rules for global finance; (2) the Brexit negotiations, when the EU acted as a bloc against the United Kingdom and successfully safeguarded the integrity of the Single Market; and (3) the fulsome war in Ukraine, during which the EU ‘weaponised’ its Single Market through the adoption of financial sanctions against Russia. We argue that a combination of external and internal factors accounts for this pattern: the evolution of the international economic and political system, in particular, the increasing challenges to the liberal international order, and intra‐EU developments, namely, the EU's ability to deploy its Single Market geoeconomically.

Representing Scotland: Conservative narratives of nation, union, and Scottish independence

The United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union reignited the debate about Scottish independence, requiring statewide political parties to rearticulate the case for the Union. The UK Conservative Party, as the party of government and one with a tumultuous history vis-à-vis Scotland and devolution, was at the fore in making this case. This article explores representations of Scotland, its position within the United Kingdom, and Scottish nationalism as a political force by the Conservative Party at a prolonged moment of significant political and constitutional tension. We focus, therefore, on 2019 to 2024, a parliamentary term and political period defined by protracted debates on Scotland’s place within the Union, playing out against the backdrop of the Brexit negotiations, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a worsening cost-of-living crisis. To this end, we draw upon parliamentary debates, two daily English newspapers (The Daily Telegraph and the Sun) and two online right-leaning news sites (ConservativeHome and The Spectator online). Our analysis identifies three distinct but interrelated strands in Conservative representations of Scotland, each of which is centred on a contrast. First, a distinction between an inclusive unionism versus a narrow nationalism; second, a largely economic narrative, contrasting a prosperous union with the economic risks of independence; and finally, a contrast between governmental competence at Westminster and the SNP-led Scottish Government failing Scotland. These contrasting narratives elucidate the ways in which Conservatives construct representations of Scotland, particularly at moments of constitutional contestation.

Establishing trust and distrust when states leave international organisations: the case of Brexit

ABSTRACT Although EU and UK participants in Brexit negotiations emphasise the role that trust and distrust played for them, existing Brexit research has largely disregarded this factor. From a trust perspective, withdrawals from international organisations are highly significant events. When states leave a common institution and their relationship with each other is deprived of previous institutional certainties, trust becomes both necessary and precarious. Building on insights from trust research in International Relations, we argue that the former partners gauge whether the other side can be trusted based on two types of signals: signals of benevolence and of integrity. Our analysis shows that during Boris Johnson’s premiership, the EU lost trust in the UK government’s benevolence and integrity, mainly because the UK repeatedly failed to honour previous commitments. Rishi Sunak’s government countered the signals sent by its predecessor. By demonstrating its integrity and benevolence, it succeeded in rebuilding trust and facilitated the conclusion of the ‘Windsor Framework’. This not only sheds light on an under-researched dimension of the Brexit process. It also contributes to trust research, which has yet to fully acknowledge both the significance of signals of trustworthiness and leadership transitions in creating windows of opportunity for changes in trust dynamics.

Mapping the Coercive Turn: Universal Credit, Social Crisis, and the Politics of Welfare in Austerity Britain, 2010–2019

This article examines the politics of welfare in Britain from 2010 to 2019. Drawing on Gramscian literature, the first section outlines an original framework of the ‘divide-and-rule’ politics of welfare during the 1980s and 1990s in the United Kingdom. The second section examines the return of welfare restructuring in Britain following the 2008 global financial crisis, focusing on Universal Credit. It contends that a significant escalation of coercive social policies within the social security system undermined previous social antagonisms underpinning the political coalitions of neoliberal welfare reform. Alongside deepening economic stagnation and dislocation exacerbated by austerity after 2010, it argues that this coercive turn intensified an unfolding crisis of legitimacy. The third section examines the politics of welfare amid an unfolding social crisis in Britain. It argues that despite burgeoning socio-political discontent and the emergence of the counter-hegemonic project of Corbynism, 2016–2019 was characterised by an interregnum. With the defeat of Corbynism amid protracted Brexit negotiations, this included a period of political impasse in which popular support for welfare reform, austerity and neoliberalism were in decline, but without an attendant shift in the balance of political forces to advance an alternative hegemonic project. As a result, a deepening social crisis continued to unfold.

When the dust has settled: A negotiation theory analysis of the Brexit negotiations

When the dust has settled: A negotiation theory analysis of the Brexit negotiations

Common fisheries policy in the light of Brexit

The article examines the impact of the Сommon Fisheries Policy of the European Union (CFP) on the UK's withdrawal from the EU. On the one hand, the article explains the reasons for the appearance of an economically insignificant fishing issue on the forefront of the British domestic political agenda on the eve of Brexit. On the other hand, it sheds light on the factor of the CFP in the negotiations on Britain's withdrawal from the EU and the subsequent Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the parties. Also, the author elaborates on the role of fishing communities in the Brexit vote, as well as on the factors that shaped the bargaining positions and strategies of the parties in the Brexit negotiations with regards to the CFP. The article focuses on institutional and political-economic features of the CFP that determined the final agreement in terms of fisheries. Despite a few concessions from Brussels and the transfer of a quarter of the European proportion of the catch to fishermen of the United Kingdom during the transition period, the Agreement does not involve fundamental changes in the UK's fisheries policy and the cooperation with the EU. The final deal reflects the interdependence of the partners, the Europeanization of the fisheries management, and preserves preferential access to British waters for European fishermen.

Dynamics of Brexit Negotiations from the European Union 2016-2020 Period

This article discusses the dynamics of negotiating Britain's exit from the EU or Brexit. Negotiations between the UK and the EU took a long time, from the leadership of PM Theresa May to PM Boris Johnson. During Theresa May's time, Brexit efforts failed to materialize and succeeded under Boris Johnson who dared to maneuver by ignoring the parliament. This study uses a qualitative method using negotiation theory and the concept of national interest. Sources of data obtained through e-books, news, journals from Scopus and Google Scholar. The findings of this study are traceable causes, actors and parties involved during the negotiation process occurs. In addition, one of the reasons the UK wants to leave the EU is the reluctance of the EU to control its domination over the UK in domestic activities, in terms of the economy and the policy of free movement of workers.

Trust and calculation in international negotiations: how trust was lost after Brexit

Abstract How does a loss of trust affect international negotiations? We know that trust enables cooperation and comes with the risk of betrayal. Yet the effects of lost trust are not well understood, with most research in International Relations (IR) focusing on how trust is initially built in adversarial relations. In this article, we conceptualize trust as the eclipsing of possible futures in which others do not behave cooperatively. When trust is lost, actors include further possibilities of non-cooperative behavior in their calculations and adjust their negotiating demands accordingly. We use this framework to explain the European Commission's response to Boris Johnson's government breaking its trust during the Brexit negotiations by deviating from the Political Declaration, introducing the Internal Market Bill, and not conducting border checks in the Irish Sea. Drawing on elite interviews, we trace how the Commission altered its expectations and consequently sought negotiated outcomes with tighter contracting, reduced discretion and retaliatory mechanisms. Analysing the interplay of trust and calculation on a granular level, we show that breaches of trust do not preclude future cooperation per se, but shape its form and extent in important ways.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: European Disintegration, Brexit, and Gibraltar

This article aims to explore the contours of Gibraltar, a uniquely situated region in Europe and a non-self-governing British overseas territory. It explores the basis for Gibraltar’s continued and maintained presence within the EU after Brexit. Gibraltar’s full accession into the Schengen area, which was expected to be implemented by the end of 2022, is a significant departure from the disintegration that was observable elsewhere in Brexit negotiations but also does not align with the United Kingdom’s staunch resistance to Schengen more generally. This move will potentially result in Gibraltar having more features in common with what the EU refers to as outermost regions, which are remote areas within the EU where special provisions exist. To that end, this variation in approach by the United Kingdom has placed Gibraltar in an altogether different category of its own and invites new questions about the region’s specificity and status, as well as about the process of disintegration more generally. We argue that Gibraltar’s desire to join the Schengen area has presented challenges to the ongoing predicament of Brexit and has exacerbated its outlier position within the EU. This has given rise to specific questions that this article aims to address: What is the current situation of Gibraltar regarding the United Kingdom and the EU? And, what can the case of Gibraltar teach us in terms of disintegration? This article also examines, from a political science perspective, how reclassifying territories can be employed as a vector to facilitate the United Kingdom’s efforts to disintegrate from the EU, but underscores the ongoing issues surrounding the reclassification of Gibraltar and its people, with every effort to do so proving challenging.

What about Europe? European identity and spatial imaginaries of Europe among Polish migrants during post-Brexit negotiations in Scotland

This article takes the concept of spatial imaginaries to explore how the post-Brexit negotiations shifted meanings of ‘Europe’ for Polish migrants residing in Scotland. A flourishing subfield of ‘Brexit geographies’ has explored the meaning and consequences of Brexit (as an event, process and affect) for wide-ranging communities on the move and in place. Yet, the question of how ‘Europe’, and in particular ‘EUrope’, is being re-imagined and re-constituted by EU migrants residing in uncertain political spaces remains understudied. In this article, we address this lacuna through analysis of biographical narrative interviews and spatial mapping exercises. In doing so, we conduct a multi-scalar analysis of Polish migrants’ discursive and visual representations of EUrope, defined both as a geographical and institutional space. The study is spatially and temporally situated at a particular time and place in the Brexit timeline – the summer of 2019 in rural and urban Scotland. At this time, Brexit negotiations were ongoing, there was widespread uncertainty about the consequences for migrants in the United Kingdom, and, in Scotland particularly, much resistance to leaving the European Union. The article argues that while Brexit might have not affected European identity among Polish migrants in Scotland, it has prompted them to reconsider their place in Europe and to reimagine both the geographical and conceptual parameters of EUrope.

State aid policy in the United Kingdom post-Brexit: a case of de-Europeanisation as orbiting Europeanisation

ABSTRACT Competition policy has been at the core of the European integration project from its very inception. The United Kingdom (UK) played a truly pivotal role in the development of European Union (EU) competition policy with the policy long presenting one of the best illustrations of Europeanisation. The public vote for Brexit in 2016 pushed the reset button for the UK’s engagement with the EU and saw successive UK governments all pursuing a de-Europeanisation trajectory as part of their objective of ‘taking back control’. State aid emerged as a contentious issue during the Brexit negotiations. The UK government hailed its new Subsidy Control Act (2023) as a clear departure from the EU state aid regime, but is this a case of de-Europeanisation or partial de-Europeanisation? This article argues that the UK has still not entirely broken free from EU’s state aid regime and finds itself in a state of orbiting Europeanisation.

Withdrawal symptoms: party factions, political change and British foreign policy post-Brexit

ABSTRACT The effects of Brexit on British foreign, security and defence policy have been complex. Initial efforts to agree structured cooperation failed, with later governments refusing to negotiate on this area, followed by unstructured re-engagement after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This article argues that these changes can be explained by reference to the factional politics during the Brexit negotiations within the Conservative Party, with the defeat of May’s Withdrawal Agreement bringing to power a pro-Brexit faction with a distinct foreign policy worldview and incentives to demonstrate a cleaner break from the European Union. Empirically, the article draws on a series of interviews conducted with UK and EU policymakers. The findings demonstrate the significance of ideology and party factions in a policy domain where the UK is powerful enough to treat EU institutions as useful rather than necessary, and shows the direct and indirect ways factional politics brings about external change.

Have your cake and eat it, too? Switzerland and the feasibility of differentiated integration after Brexit

A key Eurosceptic argument is that countries can selectively retain only those aspects of European integration from which they benefit, while opting out of those aspects they dislike. How convincing is this “have your cake and eat it, too” argument to voters? This article argues that voters can learn about the feasibility of such a strategy by looking at the experience of countries that pursued a similar path. Positive experiences can strengthen voters’ support for a similar strategy, while negative experiences can deter them. This argument is tested in a study of the effects of the Brexit negotiations on public opinion in Switzerland. Drawing on a panel survey fielded between 2019 and 2021, the article shows that Brexit had a small but non-negligible impact on Swiss voters’ expectations about the EU’s resolve, as well as on vote intentions on two EU-related policy proposals. These findings confirm that voters learn from foreign political developments about the costs of non-cooperation.

Contemporary Problems of Implementation of the Protocol on Northern Ireland after Brexit

The article analyses some aspects of the practice of implementing the Protocol on Northern Ireland as one of the main elements of the legal formalisation of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. The problem of Northern Ireland was one of the central issues in the Brexit negotiation process. The found and agreed solution in the form of the Protocol on Northern Ireland initially raised many questions and concerns primarily from the UKs side, which were later confirmed during the implementation of the document. Immediately after Brexit, the British government took an official position on the need to revise the Protocol as an integral part of the withdrawal agreement, in particular, by initiating a Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which unilaterally terminates a number of provisions of the Protocol. It is quite natural that such actions on the British side caused indignation of the European Commission, which initiated the appropriate judicial procedure against the UK. An analysis of the process of implementation of the Protocol on Northern Ireland allowed the author to conclude on the negative consequences of the decisions taken by the British government for bilateral relations with the European Union in various fields, as well as the implementation of other provisions of the concluded agreement on trade and cooperation between the two sides. The scientific methods for the underlying research in this article are well-known. The purpose and objectives of the work are to study the relevant problems associated with the implementation of the Protocol on Northern Ireland, the factors contributing to them, as well as the consequences of the decisions taken.

Проблема энергетической безопасности Великобритании во время и после Брекзита (март 2017 – 2022 гг.)

The article is devoted to the problem of the ensuring the UK energy security during the UK exit from the European Union (Brexit) (March 28, 2017 – December 31, 2020) and after it (till 2022). The problem is considered in its evolution: from the cabinets of Theresa May (July 2016 – July 2019), via the activity of the Boris Johnson’s cabinets (July 2019 – September 2022), and up to the steps made by Liz Truss’s cabinet (September – October 2022) and by the current cabinet of Rishi Sunak (from October 25, 2022 till now) to strengthen the UK energy security. The article shows that the diversification of the British energy sector into the direction of growing use of low-cost, low-carbon electricity generation (on the nuclear power and the renewable energy sources) was a key for solving simultaneously several problems during and after Brexit. The quick development of the electricity generation by the renewable energy sources (especially by the construction of offshore wind and solar farms) helped to reduce the dependence of British economy on the fossil fuel supply from unstable countries of the world and from the EU and in this regard was considered by T. May’s cabinet as a mean to strengthen the UK’s position in Brexit negotiation with the EU. The successful development of electricity generation from renewable energy sources also facilitated the reduction of greenhouse gases emission (as a part of international efforts to mitigate global climate change) along with the UK economic growth and let the UK, as the first country in the world, set course for decarbonization of British economy by 2050. The author comes to the conclusion that the problems of reducing greenhouse gases emission and of reaching self-sufficiency by the British energy system have remained the main ones in ensuring the UK energy security after Brexit.

A small state finding its way in the EU: Croatia and its approach to Brexit

ABSTRACT As a small and new EU member state Croatia had little to contribute to Brexit, which occurred just a few years after the country’s accession to the EU. Stemming from its size, its pre-existing relations with the UK and its drive to learn to operate within the EU, Croatia is no outlier in the literature on small states’ foreign policy. This paper analyses the behaviour of Croatia during Brexit and adds to the literature on small states. First, it analyses whether and to what extent Croatia opted for one or more of the following strategies: seeking shelter, hiding or hedging during the Brexit negotiations. Second, it examines the logics underpinning the aforementioned strategies (logic of consequences vs. logic of appropriateness). Third, it scrutinizes Brexit’s impact on the Europeanisation of Croatia’s foreign and defence policies and possible advancement or undermining of this Europeanisation process. We focus on both policy-uploading and policy-downloading dimensions of Europeanisation, thus contributing to the literature on Europeanisation. Our research is based on existing literature, second-hand sources such as official documents and statements, and the primary data collected through semi-structured interviews with eight persons who either shaped the Croatian foreign and defence policies or were well-informed about them.

Unmasking the Brexit negotiations: the behavioural psychology of two-level games

Unmasking the Brexit negotiations: the behavioural psychology of two-level games

“Slaughterhouse cattle are treated better than this”: exploring the salience of everyday nationhood at British airports

ABSTRACT Questions remain about nationhood’s everyday salience – that is, whether and how nationhood is engaged with by “ordinary people” undertaking routine activities. We present an innovative methodology for investigating everyday nationhood at the international border. We created a social media dataset of 1,083 “tweets” made during British airport border crossings, where nationhood might be expected to be particularly salient – especially during a period corresponding to post-referendum Brexit negotiations. We used content analysis to generate descriptive frequencies, before analysing these broad patterns in further detail via qualitative analysis. Nationhood is found to be largely absent, at least explicitly. A large majority focus on the contingencies of everyday life in highly individualist and consumer-oriented ways. The most common identification – “non-EU” – indicates border-crossing experiences framed by geopolitical inequalities, but only rarely by nationhood. One possible exception to the dominant patterns is a highly individualist, tacit manifestation of Britishness.

Entrenching positions? The dynamics of Brexit negotiations mirrored in British, Irish, and EU executives’ speeches

ABSTRACT Brexit constitutes an unprecedented crisis for the European Union and its member states. Three affected parties – the United Kingdom, the EU and Ireland – worked hard to protect their interests, making the negotiations difficult, especially regarding the Irish land border. While the key interests of the negotiating partners are clear, it is less known how and to what extent these interests were communicated by the political representatives of the three countries. We approach Brexit as a critical juncture and base our work on the framing literature. We use a unique dataset including political speeches made by EU Commission members and the UK and Irish government officials during a period from January 2016 until January 2020, relying on the innovative automated text analysis approach of keyword-assisted topic modelling. Beyond insisting on their interests, communication reflects the socio-political context. We find indications that speeches reflect the flow of the negotiations. Finally, our analysis reveals topics that largely flew under the media radar, such as research and protection.

Glass Cliff and Brexit: Theresa May’s legacy as Prime Minister

Following the 2016 British referendum, Theresa May was officially appointed as PM. She was classed as a weak PM, and her legacy was considered a huge failure in Brexit negotiations. Yet, few analyses focus on how she became a PM in such a challenging moment for UK-EU relations. This article explores the paths that lead May to this position, based on the glass cliff literature. Then, May’s brinkmanship strategy on Brexit is analysed in light of Complex Adaptive Systems’ approach to crises. We apply the CDE model to understand May’s response to the Brexit vote. Finally, the concept of men glass cushion will be introduced to explain May’s replacement by Boris Johnson. This work joins efforts to employ perspectives from other areas, such as administration and psychology, to understand women in leadership roles and to bring light to the study of gender in politics.