David Cameron’s deal with the EU

David Cameron eventually got his deal with the rest of the EU on 19 February. This was hardly surprising. Even though the round table discussions and bilateral negotiations took 16 hours, they began with a presumption of success.

The Rubicon was crossed two months earlier, at the December European Council, when Cameron’s colleagues concluded that an agreement was feasible and declared their willingness to do all that was required to achieve it and, more importantly still, when the British Prime Minister himself finally stopped ‘flirting’ with the idea of an EU exit. From then on, it was not exactly a shoo-in, but the odds were overwhelmingly in favour of a negotiated settlement.

Donald Tusk set the tone in his opening remarks at the first working session on 18 February. ‘A great deal is at stake. We all know how important it is to keep the UK in the Union. And our decisions will shape British public opinion in the referendum.’

His colleagues from North and South, East and West, followed suit.

Enda Kenny’s intervention, which the otherwise emotionless Antici transcript described as ‘passionate’, was the most outspoken. But almost everybody else expressed similar sentiments. ‘We must keep Europe united,’ the Romanian president declared. ‘I therefore hope that the UK will remain a member.’ Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president, wished ‘David’, every success. So too did Matteo Renzi: ‘Our primary objective should be to give David a good chance of winning the referendum.’

According to President Anastasiades of Cyprus, it was important to strike a new relationship between the EU and Britain, not just to pacify the UK, but also to strengthen the EU. As for Angela Merkel, still, despite everything the most powerful member of the European Council and, in Cameron’s eyes at least, Britain’s special friend, she called on her colleagues to adopt a conciliatory approach towards the British demands, ‘because otherwise the UK will leave the Union’.

The negotiations proper were not always easy and took longer than expected.

They began at 2.30 am on 19 February and continued, with no more than a five and a half hour break between 5.30 am and 11.00 am, until 22.30 in the evening. Donald Tusk and his team had to see François Hollande four times and David Cameron twice before the two of them finally agreed on language defining relations between Euro Area member states and non-Euro Area members.

There were other delays too.

The Danish Prime Minister did not like the deal which Tusk brokered between the Visegrad Four states and the UK on the indexation of child benefits and the Presidency was therefore obliged to go back to square one. The Luxembourg Prime Minister meanwhile was nervous about the implications for his country as a financial centre of the Anglo-French agreement on the Euro Area and he too had to be appeased.

As the devil lay as always in the detail, these squabbles over specific issues took time to resolve. They did not modify the overall architecture of the deal however let alone prevent it from emerging. In the end, David Cameron got most of what he asked for at the beginning of the plenary session on the Thursday evening and none of his European Council colleagues felt or looked like losers. The Presidency had done its job well in other words and was duly and appropriately thanked.

The result was not however as unproblematic as it might at first sight appear to be.

Firstly and most obviously, success in the renegotiation does not guarantee success in the referendum. Referenda are rarely if ever exclusively about the question on the ballot paper. Britain’s ‘most important political decision in a generation’ may in other words be determined as much if not more by factors and forces which have little or nothing to do with what was agreed on 19 February.

Secondly, neither the settlement nor the sentiments and calculations which lie behind it amount to a declaration of unconditional love and support. The February European Council said ‘Yes’ to the UK. This sign of favour was by no means costless or unlimited however. Faced by a British Leave vote in June, the European Council’s members will doubtless base their response on raisons d’état rather than emotion. Sentiments matter however and not all of those on display at or after the February Council were positive.

Everybody was determined to ‘help David’ and in doing so to get the British problem out of the way once and for all. This sentiment was however accompanied, even amongst the Cameron administration’s oldest and most trusted allies, by expressions of amazement bordering in certain cases on contempt that the British Prime Minister had allowed himself to get into such a mess, coupled with resentment that at a time when the EU minus the UK is grappling with the most serious challenge in its six decade history, the EU’s other 27 heads of state or government were obliged to spend 3 hours in plenary sessions and 13 hours in negotiations about what was essentially a British domestic problem.

Outside the Council chamber, Michel Rocard, a former French prime minister echoed Cromwell’s speech to the Rump Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go!’ His successors inside were more circumspect. One very senior and responsible figure in the EU hierarchy expressed a widely held view however: ‘After forty years of problematic membership, the British have now exhausted most if not all of the political capital they once had.’

The final version of the European Council’s Conclusions, which were revised at the Belgian Prime Minister’s insistence, said much the same thing in politically binding language: It is understood that, should the result of the referendum in the United Kingdom be for it to leave the European Union, the set of arrangements referred to in paragraph 2 above will cease to exist.

Or, in plain English, ‘this is it: you take it or leave it’. It would be totally unrealistic to hope for, let alone expect second thoughts. The EU and its member states simply cannot afford to spend further time or effort trying to keep Britain in.

Thirdly, the UK has now formally agreed to become a second class member. The statement in the first paragraph of the section on sovereignty, that Britain is ‘not committed to further political integration into the European Union’ and that it’s special status will be ‘incorporated into the Treaties at the time of their next revision’, may appear innocent. British exceptionalism has after all been a fact of life ever since the Maastricht Treaty.

As the February settlement itself reminds us, the British do not use the common currency, do not participate in the Schengen Agreement, can choose whether or not to participate in measures in the area of freedom, security and justice, and have ceased to apply ‘a large majority of Union acts and provisions in the field of police cooperation and judicial cooperation in criminal matters’. The February agreement goes further however. It institutionalises exceptionalism. The British belong to the EU but are not of it. They are second class members and are never likely to be more.

The finality of the language is bound over time to affect the behaviour of both the British and their partners. For those of us - many more than is generally assumed by forgetful or youthful journalists and commentators - who supported Britain’s entry into the EU for political as well as economic reasons, it represents a significant defeat.

It also has important practical implications, however, both for the referendum and beyond. The choice which the British electorate is currently being offered is not between membership of an EU which, for all its faults, still aspires to become, and in many respects already is, a ‘broad and deep community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts’, and no membership at all, but between no membership at all and maintenance at more or less its present level of the UK’s part-membership.

There are many in the Remain campaign who would probably respond: ‘So what? Isn’t this precisely what the UK wants?’ This is too facile by half however. The EU is not a static process.

On the contrary, as the December European Council’s endorsement of the idea of an EU Border Guard reminded us yet again, it is continuing to develop without Britain even now, in a time of crisis. And in doing so, as Harold Macmillan recognised it would, when he first decided that it was in the UK’s interests to join what was then the European Community, it is altering the balance of power between insiders and outsiders and the character and content of relations between Europe and the rest of the world.

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.