The scorn with which “EU sources” have briefed about Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker’s disastrous dinner in Downing Street is an indication of the dismay felt in Brussels at how the coming Brexit negotiations are going to disrupt normal EU business.
So far that potential has been vastly underestimated — and the disruption has only just begun.
Look at the context of the dinner: as POLITICO reported at the end of last week, the European Commission leadership was exasperated that the British government would not give consent (albeit in the form of an abstention) to the proposed mid-term review of 2014-20 EU spending plans.
The British claimed such a politically important decision was inappropriate during an election campaign — and invoked “electoral purdah.” That prompted an intemperate message from Martin Selmayr, head of Commission president Juncker’s private office, that there would be reciprocal purdah over the Brexit talks “formal or informal” until after the British election.
It is plausible that British recalcitrance on the budget review triggered the briefing against May and her colleagues. To the Commission, that mid-term review is an important objective — Juncker’s team wants to rebalance the spending priorities that were set before the current administration took office.
Although the proposal had already been delayed by Italy and foot-dragging by the European Parliament, indignation at the U.K. “blocking” it was greater because Britain had previously signaled its readiness to abstain. On the shelf for the moment, the review may next be delayed by Germany’s elections.
One may well wonder whether the Commission’s exasperation justifies the semi-public trashing of the British negotiating team by unnamed “EU sources.” Not for the first time in EU history, officials intoxicated by a superior technocratic understanding of EU law display a clumsy touch with the politics of what to do with that superiority.
It is hard to see how the EU’s interests are served by sowing distrust, no matter how wide the gulf in comprehension. Nor can I imagine this briefing war going down well with Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, who had engineered a show of unity from the EU27 leaders on Saturday when they swiftly approved guidelines for the Brexit negotiations.
But unjustifiable and unhelpful though the trash-talk was, it is understandable. If you are at, or near, the top of the Commission, with ambitions to restore the EU to health by “delivering results” in the interests of EU citizens, then what is unfolding before you is a slow-motion motorway pile-up triggered by the Brexit car-crash.
Worse to come
The squabbling and scrapping over which countries and cities should get to host EU agencies displaced from the U.K. is only a small foretaste of the distractions that lie ahead.
Brexit will be diverting the EU’s attention for months and months to come. Arrangements for clearing and settlement in EU-regulated banks and investment houses currently sited in London; an external EU border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; the regulation of fishing in the North Sea: Almost everywhere you look the unwanted consequences of Brexit come muscling their way onto the EU’s agenda. Irritation, even resentment, would be unsurprising.
There is much talk in Brussels of how the British government has not done its homework and is unprepared for the implications of what Brexit means in so many different walks of life (latest installment: a parliamentary report on ending the U.K.’s automatic membership of Euratom, the treaty that governs the nuclear energy industry).
But beyond scoping out what has to be covered in the Brexit negotiations, the EU itself is not ready for how much Brexit is going to intrude on its policy- and law-making agenda. To be fair, the calculation is hard to make when it is not clear where the British government would like to end up (another source of frustration for those with whom they are negotiating).
But as the Commission tries to hold onto the tiller, it finds that Brexit is generating turbulence in waters that were previously reasonably still. The promise that the EU would not be blown off course by Brexit becomes increasingly hard to keep.
The optimistic or phlegmatic view is that the two sides are simply testing each other at the outset of high-stakes negotiations and the macho posturing must give way to a more workmanlike atmosphere. Perhaps the climate will improve and the dust will clear. But the content of the Brexit negotiations will be no easier than the process. There is worse to come.
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