cheers. some highlights:
After Brexit: the UK will need to renegotiate at least 759 treaties
FT research reveals that agreements with 168 countries must be redone just for Britain to stand still
It poses a formidable and little-understood challenge for Britain’s prime minister after the June 8 election. While Brexit is often cast as an affair between Brussels and London, in practice Britain’s exit will open more than 750 separate time-pressured mini-negotiations worldwide, according to Financial Times research. And there are no obvious shortcuts: even a basic transition after 2019 requires not just EU-UK approval, but the deal-by-deal authorisation of every third country involved.
“The nearest precedent you can think of is a cessation of a country — you are almost starting from scratch,” says Andrew Hood, a former UK government lawyer now at Dechert. “It will be a very difficult, iterative process.” Britain finds itself at the diplomatic starting line, with the status quo upended and all sides reassessing their interests.
To Brexiters this is a liberation that allows Britain to negotiate better, more ambitious deals with trading partners, shorn of the encumbrance of Brussels dogma and politics.
At worst, they say, existing arrangements would be continued through drafting tweaks replacing “EU” with “UK”; at best they would be improved. Boris Johnson, foreign secretary, said nations were “already queueing up” to do deals.
Even if it were this simple, critics still fear it will open a bureaucratic vortex, sapping energy and resources. Each agreement must be reviewed, the country approached, the decision makers found, meetings arranged, trips made, negotiations started and completed — all against a ticking clock and the backdrop of Brexit, with the legal and practical constraints that brings. Most inconvenient of all, many countries want to know the outcome of EU-UK talks before making their own commitments.
“We are talking about an enormous number of complex acts that we rely on today,” says Lord Hannay, Britain’s former EU ambassador. “The challenge of replacing them falls in the same category as Alice in Wonderland running furiously to stand in the same spot.”
At its most granular level, the sheer administrative scale of the “third country” question is striking. Through analysis of the EU treaty database, the FT found 759 separate EU bilateral agreements with potential relevance to Britain, covering trade in nuclear goods, customs, fisheries, trade, transport and regulatory co-operation in areas such as antitrust or financial services. This includes multilateral agreements based on consensus, where Britain must re-approach 132 separate parties. Around 110 separate opt-in accords at the UN and World Trade Organisation are excluded from the estimates, as are narrow agreements on the environment, health, research and science. Some additional UK bilateral deals, outside the EU framework, may also need to be revised because they make reference to EU law.
All the agreements must be sifted, creating a huge legal tangle. With Switzerland alone there are 49 accords, while there are 44 with the US and 38 with Norway. Even in potentially consequential areas, some countries are barely aware of Brexit implications. When asked by the FT about a specific customs agreement, one sanguine Indian diplomat first denied it existed, then said it would not matter anyway: “I’m sure people have forgotten it.”
“The logistics are terrifying, even just to go through these commitments and treaties and scope them out,” says Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, a former trade official for Sweden and the EU now at the European Centre for International Political Economy. “Do you want revisions? Do they? Do you go there? How many visits to Chile will this take? That’s a massive logistical operation in itself.
