For a true politician, only what is inevitable is predictable. And as long as things remain political, they are not inevitable. Brexit has always been, and will remain, political. There is therefore nothing inevitable in the outlook for relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU), in the short, medium or long term. And if nothing is inevitable, nothing is known in advance. Political relations, like social relations, are formed, renewed and broken through processes which determine them. And, as we will see, a breakup is hard to come to terms with: in this case it is difficult to conclude, it will leave traces and scars.
By nature, the relationship between the EU and the United Kingdom can evolve according to very diverse logics and results, on all imaginable horizons: we could therefore be content to wait… But certain solutions are more likely than others, and even a non-predictive political science can hope to identify at least some determining factors for the future relationship.
If it is impossible today to know which form of Brexit will materialize among all those that can be conceived, not all imaginable forms of Brexit are possible, and not everything that is possible is likely. We will therefore hazard here conjectures that are more probabilistic than predictive, hoping that they help to clarify some of the issues, and the factors that could contribute to the resolution of the problem.
Prospects for an agreement, possible consequences of one no deal
In October 2020, this text is written at a time when trade negotiations between the EU and the United Kingdom seem particularly uncertain. The “tunnel” in which they seem to find themselves can lead to a last-minute agreement… or to a dead end. The consequences of these two hypotheses on the relationship between the two actors would be radically different.
How can we find ourselves, less than three months before a possible Brexit without a trade agreement, ignoring whether an agreement, whatever it may be, remains possible? And what does this situation tell us about the motivations of the negotiating parties? Two points can be highlighted here. […]
PLAN
- Prospects for an agreement, possible consequences of a no deal
- Scenarios for a future relationship
- Long-term factors in the post-Brexit relationship
 – The practical difficulties of the strategy of Global Britain
– The damage to the Anglo-liberal growth model
 – Political variables are no less significant
Florence Faucher is a professor at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences-Po Paris, and an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Colin Hay is a professor at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences-Po Paris, and co-founder of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) at the University of Sheffield.
Translated from English (Great Britain) by Dominique David.
