Forget Brexit – the EU has bigger problems now

Strange to say, at least from a UK perspective, Brexit isn’t even formally on the agenda at the current EU summit of heads of government. The 27 presidents, prime ministers and chancellors meeting virtually would, had a full legal text been completed, be ready to approve a new UK-EU free trade deal. In theory, a high-level session between Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, might have been convened earlier, to flatten any remaining matters of contention.  

That, however, did not occur and another possible outbreak of Covid in the negotiating teams even put the existing talks on hold. So there is nothing for the 27 to discuss. Reportedly, next week is the latest final deadline. Had all gone entirely to plan when Article 50 was triggered, and the UK formally applied to leave back in March 2017, then all would have been settled by March 2019 and, in the British hope, the exact same benefits as membership being enjoyed now.  

It is of course perfectly possible that future deadlines will slip. There is talk of an eve of deadline special summit on 28 December, with the end of the transition period set in British law and European assumptions on 31 December, at 11pm. Obviously that does not allow for a legal text to be translated into 23 official languages and ratified by about 30 regional, national and supra-national parliaments and assemblies. So some kind of grace period might be required. Obviously businesses and citizens will also need some space to make their final adjustments (given that there will be radical change whatever happens). Informally, the Biden administration in the US will also need to be happy.  

The more pressing question for Europe is how to accommodate its currently two most awkward members rather than its demanding ex-member. Poland and Hungary, put simply, want more money from the EU budget, fewer migrants and the freedom to do as they wish with their local media and courts – which is to say constrain them.

The argument turns in a simple and usually unremarkable condition attached to EU funds, and indeed EU membership more broadly, that a member state agrees to uphold the rule of law. However, the populist authoritarian governments in Warsaw and Budapest, led by Mateusz Morawiecki and Viktor Orban find such structures an unacceptable infringement on their sovereignty. Leaders such as Emmanuel Macron regard the eastern states’ social conservatism (most recently a tightening of abortion law in Poland) as offensive to Europe’s progressive values; the Poles and Hungarians couldn’t care less. Hence the stand-off and eventual inevitable fudge.  

A few years ago, after the triumph of Brexit and Trump, and before that the financial traumas across the eurozone, there was some possibility that the EU could break up. Italy and Greece, possibly joined by Spain and Portugal would either leave or effectively be forced out of the euro single currency area, if not the EU. The Germans, Dutch and Finns, fed up of paying the bills would refound an inner financially solvent EU. The Swedes and Danes, quiet sceptics who retained their own currencies would recast their relationship on “British” free trade lines. The French would be left virtually alone, holding firm but lonely to the old EU structures.  

While the echoes of such past dramas can still be heard, and the tensions easily revived, a decade in from the eurozone crisis and the EU is holding together. It still can’t agree on a budget, or how to control unruly populist governments, or sanctions on Turkey and Byelorussia, as this week shows. But the unspoken verdict must be that, perversely, the unhappy example of Brexit has made a break up of the EU rather less likely. Which leaves Britain rather lonely.