Between renegotiation and referendum

When assessing the UK’s chances of remaining within the EU, it is important to distinguish between the renegotiation and the referendum.

The renegotiation began in the middle of last year and will reach its climax at a meeting of the European Council on 18 February. Prior to the European Council meeting on 17 December, it was a piecemeal affair, featuring occasional, public statements by the British prime minister or the chancellor, bilateral discussions between David Cameron and the other EU heads of state and government, and a detailed examination of the ways in which the UK Prime Minister’s demands could be met by a small group of senior officials, chaired by Jeppe Tranholm Mikkelsen, the secretary general of the EU Council of Ministers.

Almost everybody involved was well-disposed towards the British.

The pre-December exchanges, which culminated in a series of bilateral ‘confessionals’ in which Piotr Serafin, Tusk’s chief of staff, saw senior officials from every member state on a one to one basis, nevertheless highlighted just how difficult it is going to be to agree a package. The fourth basket in David Cameron’s shopping list, dealing with social benefits and the free movement of persons, was especially troublesome, but it was by no means the only source of difficulty.

Mario Draghi, for example, expressed serious concerns about the UK Treasury’s desire to have the EU re-designated as a ‘multi-currency’ Union and the question of what might or might not be done to enhance the powers of national parliaments without paralysing the system - a question which the EU has wrestled with for many decades - was as challenging as ever. There were also problems about the form in which the new commitments to the UK should be enshrined and, if they involved treaty change, how and when this could be achieved.

Nobody close to the action was ready to contemplate failure, let alone to prepare a Plan B, but by the time that Donald Tusk and David Cameron reviewed the situation in the first week of December, it was clear that an agreement was still not in sight and that the December European Council would have to inject fresh momentum into a process which was in danger of drifting off course.

Developments over the next few weeks will confirm whether it succeeded in doing so or not.

In the immediate aftermath of the meeting the mood was relatively upbeat. Cameron made an exceptionally long, carefully worded and non-confrontational opening statement explaining what he wanted and why. And with one exception, Cameron’s colleagues responded positively to his conciliatory message. The reasons that they gave for wanting to reach an agreement varied, and some, like Enda Kenny the Irish prime minister, were more passionate than others. What mattered however was that everybody clearly wanted the UK to stay in the EU. There were still important technical details which needed to be clarified, but even the senior officials whom David Cameron had unfairly (and unwisely) dismissed as ‘theologians and lawyers’ shortly before the December Council, were inclined to believe that where there was so obviously a will, there would be a way.

The outcome of the renegotiation is still too close to call, however. The EU is a rules based enterprise and there are limits to how far even the most ingenious technocrats powered by the highest of high political winds can find ways round them. It is probably right to assume that appropriate language can be found to cover the first three ‘baskets’- euro/non-euro, competitiveness and sovereignty - but nobody has yet come near to providing a workable solution to the migrants’ benefits questions, which as far as the Tory eurosceptics, UKIP and much of the media are concerned, is the single most important issue.

Even if there is an agreement on 18 February, however, that will not be the end of the story. The referendum, like all referendums, is bound to be influenced by purely domestic, and in some cases entirely irrelevant factors, such as Boris Johnson’s ambition to become Prime Minister. It is therefore too big a subject to deal with comprehensively in this blog. Two observations are nevertheless germane.

Firstly, the politics of the 2016/17 referendum will be very different from the politics of the 1975 referendum. The pro-European campaign won in 1975 largely because it was supported by a huge majority of MPs and activists in all the main parties, by business, which provided it with a substantial amount of money, and by almost the whole of the media, red tops as well as broad sheets. In 2016, by contrast, the political class is deeply divided, the media is more negative than positive and business support is far from homogeneous.

Secondly, far from empowering David Cameron as he originally assumed it would, a successful conclusion to the renegotiation process may actually complicate his efforts to convince the electorate that the UK’s continuing membership of the EU is in the national interest. The reason should already be obvious from what has been said earlier in this blog. Even the best conceivable compromise on 18 February will not result in anything remotely resembling a fundamental redefinition of the UK’s status in the EU, let alone a root and branch ‘reform’ of the Union. In which case, it must be asked, what is the referendum meant to be about? The answer of the Leave campaign will clearly be - and indeed already is - that the renegotiation has failed and that the UK should leave the EU. Cameron will protest, but even he, with all his PR skills, will be hard pressed to present what will at best be a meagre package as a ‘triumph’.

And if he cannot do that, what can he do? There is no simple answer, but his best tactic, as John Major implied in December, will presumably be to try to decouple the renegotiation and the referendum and to make the latter a straightforward In/Out affair. This will however be fiendishly difficult and the Prime Minister will doubtless (and justifiably) be derided for attempting to shift the goal posts.

David Cameron’s European Council partners meanwhile will only be able to wait and see whether an accident that has threatened to happen ever since Cameron made his ill-advised Bloomberg speech in January 2013 actually occurs. To her credit, Angela Merkel tried to avert it even before the journey began. At a working dinner in Downing Street on 7 November 2012, she told Cameron: ‘I want the UK to remain within the EU and I will do all that I can to help you. But I can only help you if you are able and willing to help yourself.’ The question of whether or not the UK stays in the EU is in other words, as it always has been, a matter of the UK’s domestic politics.

About the author

Peter Ludlow is the chairman of EuroComment and co-chairman with Antonio Vitorino of the European Strategy Forum. After fifteen years teaching International History in the University of London and at the European University Institute in Florence, he was Founding Director of CEPS (the Centre for European Policy Studies) in Brussels from 1981 to 2001. He has written and edited numerous books and articles on international history and European integration and has since 2000 been the privileged but non-official historian of the European Council.