Brexit Ammendola Draft March 25 2019
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BREXIT, THE EUROPEAN UNION, AND GLOBALIZATION Political and economic perspectives Giuseppe Ammendola BREXIT, THE EUROPEAN UNION, AND GLOBALIZATION Political and economic perspectives Giuseppe Ammendola 3 Datasheet Title : Brexit, The European Union, and Globalization Political and Economic Prespectives Author : Giuseppe Ammendola Edition : © OBSERVARE – Observatório de Relações Exteriores © Departamento de Relações Internacionais| Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa Book Cover : Bruno Filipe Year of Publication: 2019 e-ISBN 978-989-8191-98-4 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26619/978-989-8191-98-4 Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/11144/4207 Copyright © 2019 by Giuseppe Ammendola All rights reserved 4 Index Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Economic Transatlantic Relations today ...................................................................................... 7 The US-UK special relationship and Europe: before WW2 ................................................. 10 From WW2 to the birth of the EEC ............................................................................................... 14 From the Europe of Six to the End of the Cold War ................................................................ 20 After the Cold War .............................................................................................................................. 26 The New Millennium ......................................................................................................................... 33 The Constitutional Treaty............................................................................................................ 35 The Lisbon Treaty .......................................................................................................................... 39 The Eurozone ................................................................................................................................... 44 The Brexit referendum campaign ................................................................................................. 48 The Brexit vote results ...................................................................................................................... 53 After the Brexit referendum ........................................................................................................... 56 Theresa May’s government: the models and the issues ....................................................... 58 The Birmingham speech and moving to invoke article 50 .................................................. 62 New elections ....................................................................................................................................... 67 The results of the June 8, 2017 election ..................................................................................... 69 The Transition Period is negotiated ............................................................................................ 72 The July 2018 Chequers White Paper ......................................................................................... 74 Brexit’s economic impact ................................................................................................................. 85 Two major areas of economic uncertainty ................................................................................ 89 Salzburg and the Labor and Tory Party Conferences ............................................................ 92 The Draft Withdrawal Agreement ................................................................................................ 97 The Withdrawal Agreement: selling the deal in the UK .................................................... 103 Postponement ................................................................................................................................... 110 The new year ..................................................................................................................................... 115 Brexit: lessons to be learned ........................................................................................................ 117 Globalization ....................................................................................................................................... 126 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 132 5 Introduction The issue of the British exit from the European Union, henceforth referred to herein as Brexit, is truly important. This paper is rooted in the belief that Brexit’s consequences, no matter which legislative, regulatory, and policy paths will be chosen, are truly long-term. And they are also broader than originally thought in terms of overall influence on other countries’ domestic and international political and economic thinking and actions. In this paper, we shall identify events, factors, analytical frameworks, and opinions which have played, play, and probably will play a key role in understanding Brexit and its impact. Clearly the highlighted factors and views reflect subjective choices made by the author after looking at a literature that is extremely vast and diversified and characterized by very contrasting underlying national and world views. While the issues considered here are very complex, throughout this paper there has been an emphasis on conciseness and, hopefully, clarity. We start by first examining the present economic relations between the United States and Europe, with some emphasis on the UK. We then look at the special relationship between the US and the UK in a European and global context, along political and economic lines. The approach here is historical, going from the period preceding WW1, to WW2, to the beginning of the Cold 6 War, to the birth of the European Economic Community, to the entrance of the UK in the EEC as part of the latter’s first enlargement, to the end of the Cold War, to the nineties (including the Maastricht Treaty and the emergence of the World Trade Organization). In examining the new millennium we look at three major European integration issues: the failed Constitutional Treaty, the subsequent Lisbon Treaty, and the Eurozone and its crisis. Afterwards, we shift to a more British focus and examine the decision to hold the Brexit referendum, its campaign, and its results and the reasons for them. We then list the country models for the future trade relationship that the new Prime Minister had to consider. The road to the invocation of Article 50 by the UK in March 2017, the unexpected new elections held in June 2017, and their results are then looked at, with reference being often made to the Prime Minister’s and other prominent political figures’ public statements in the UK and abroad. We continue by looking at the July 2018 Chequers White Paper, which as a document gives a good sense of the breadth and complexity of the issues under negotiation. We then look at some of the most authoritative economic evaluations of Brexit, according to various scenarios. After that, we highlight the importance of the gravity factor in trade and the complexity of the challenges related to the very numerous treaty renegotiations triggered by leaving the EU. We then proceed to follow the public declarations by top European as well as Tory and Labor leaders with regard to the White Paper and their broader implications. Thereafter, we look at the Draft Withdrawal Agreement, its approval by the EU-27 side, and the challenges that the UK Prime Minister has had to confront in trying to have it approved by the UK Parliament. The Brexit deal and its alternatives, the multiple supportive and adversarial arguments put forth by the major political forces, the divisiveness engendered within and between political parties, regions of the UK, and its society are then discussed. We conclude with a list of areas where lessons from Brexit are being and will be learned in the future, including their global dimension. The general thrust of the paper is that the study of Brexit, regardless of its formal results in terms of EU-UK relations, on account of the breadth of its impact is going to be extremely useful to all categories of leaders in the US, Russia, and China and in all countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia involved in any form of political and economic integration. There can be little doubt that henceforth the debate on globalization is not going to be the same. 7 Economic Transatlantic Relations today One first consideration that needs to be made is the extraordinary importance that the relationship between the United States and Europe has in the world economy. 1 No other set of regional business links is as interconnected and integrated. In terms of global trade, together, the US and Europe accounted for 28.1 percent of exports and almost 33 percent of global imports in 2016.2 In terms of the totality of EU imports, the main source country in 2016 was China accounting for 20.1 percent of the total, with the Unites States holding the number two position at 14.5 percent of the total. 3 In terms of the totality of EU exports, the top target country was the United States (20.7 percent), with China a distant second at 9.6 percent. 4 Most interestingly, the relationship in terms of trade, while strong, is not the most important between the two areas. Far