EU – Brexit down agenda again, Putin at top
The main agenda for today’s European Council meeting is a reminder of the many fronts on which the EU is threatened at the moment.
Many (not all) of the 28 feel menaced by President Putin and Russia. Most directly, countries in the East feel Russia is flexing its muscles on their borders. There’s a widespread fear that Russia could make some sort of incursion into a Baltic state in the first half of next year, exploiting President-elect Donald Trump’s attacks on NATO and his warmth towards President Putin. Donald Tusk, European Council President, talks of a “challenging geopolitical environment.” He’s asked NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg along to talk to the 28 leaders.
Our own Ministry of Defence is deeply concerned that NATO might not come together and invoke Article 5 of its founding 1949 Washington Treaty if there were such an incursion, or it might invoke Article 5 but decide that the “action necessary” which the Treaty talks of is no more than diplomatic protest. In those circumstances, some senior MOD figures worry, President Putin would’ve punched a hole in NATO’s fundamental armoury and purpose from which Western security might struggle to recover.
Germany and France want to maintain sanctions imposed by the EU over Russia’s land grab in Ukraine. But in the same meeting the EU leaders find themselves sending out a very different message, softening their support for the Ukrainian government and underlining that Ukraine doesn’t qualify as a future member of the EU. That’s because the Dutch won’t ratify the EU-Ukraine Treaty without reassurances.
Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite said on arrival at this summit that the leaders would be involved in “a creative exercise to explain what is not in the (EU-Ukraine) treaty.” She sounded a little exasperated.
The Dutch referendum which rejected the Ukraine treaty is a reminder of the power of individual nations to frustrate the leaders’ will and it comes as the BBC revealed that the UK Representative to the EU, Ivan Rogers, warned Downing Street in October that EU leaders think the final conclusion of a new relationship with the UK could take several years and faced many individual national hurdles.
Ivan Rogers, our man at the EU, joined the Prime Minister in the back of the PM’s limo on the way to the European Council this morning. Some of David Cameron’s advisers believe that Mr Rogers effectively frustrated their efforts to get a better deal out of the EU in Mr Cameron’s renegotiation, persuading the PM to scale back his ambitions. Mr Rogers’ admirers would argue that he was simply conveying harsh realities and EU bottom lines and is doing the same thing all over again in the much multiplied complexity of Brexit.
Mr Rogers was a bete noire for the Vote Leave organisers. If their leadership had come to occupy the seats of power, as their most senior figures expected, he knows his services would’ve been dispensed with. As it was, Theresa May, a sort of Born Again Brexiteer, got the top job and one official involved in the preparations for Brexit said of her: “She really listens to Ivan, she really pays attention to him.”
That will mean paying attention to his famously long memos. Mr Rogers is believed to have repeatedly pleaded with Mr Cameron to prepare a contingency Brexit plan if the EU referendum went the wrong way. He was over-ruled and UK preparations are presumably not nearly as advanced as they might be at this point. He’s also believed to have warned Mr Cameron’s team that the EU leaders won’t agree a “have cake and eat it” approach on the renegotiation, a phrase that now haunts the Brexit talks.
One of many areas of tension next year could come if Britain wants to kick off talks on the new relationship (as laid out in Article 218 of the Lisbon Treaty) but the EU 27 say they’re not willing to do that until there’s much more clarity on what we’re going to pay up as the price of our exit (liabilities which have been variously estimated at between EU20b to EY60B). You can see the scope for serious disagreement here and you don’t need to have a fertile imagination to picture the impact on currency and share markets.
It’s not thought the evening dinner, the 27 meeting without the UK, will get into that level of detail but it’s clearly on the mind of the EU negotiating team.
There’s an ongoing row over whether the European Parliament gets to have a point person sitting in the Brexit talks. The European Parliament President Martin Schulz has just had a swipe at Donald Tusk on the subject: “I’m surprised that President Tusk hasn’t understood that the European Parliament isn’t an obstacle it’s an equal partner.” By the look of the draft communique for the informal meeting of the 27, Mr Schulz appears to have lost this battle. You sense some in the UK team think this fall-out, before anything serious is discussed in Brexit talks, is an omen of much more fall-out amongst the 27 to come.
The dinner is supposed to agree that the EU 27 will follow up Britain’s Article 50 letter with its own “overall positions and principles” of a negotiation mandate, to be refined and elaborated later. This is, in part, a reflection of the EU 27 expectation that the British letter triggering Article 50 won’t tell them much they don’t know, something along the lines of: Britain wants a hybrid deal that brings back control over migration, leaves the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice but retains as much access to the SIngle Market as is possible.
The EU 27 over dinner will be wanting to make sure that their lead negotiator, Michel Barnier, former European Commissioner, doesn’t just negotiate on behalf of the Commission but is closely in touch with individual member states. That, it’s explained, is the only way to have a hope of avoiding a ratification car crash which could scupper a whole deal or mean it drags on for a decade.
The next European Council moves to a smart new building next door, known as Herman’s Egg after the last European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. Back in 2011 he updated EU leaders on the plans with a controversial EU100,000 brochure. David Cameron and Angela Merkel were said to have looked on in disbelief and Mr Cameron mocked it as a “gilded cage” (a reminder of how the sort of rhetoric he used in the years running up to his attempt to get the country to stay in the EU).
Mr Van Rompuy assured everyone the building, commissioned in 2004, would come in on budget (EU240M) and be ready in 2013. The price crept up to EU321M and was finally opened this month. There are 3750 windows symbolising, the press releases say, the openness of the EU’s proceedings. But while the leaders are being sprung from the grim, concrete monstrosity next door, the Justus Lipsius building, journalists will stay confined there.