Brexit negotiations

In 2016, voters in the United Kingdom (UK) participated in a referendum on the country's future as a member of the European Union (EU). More than thirty million people cast ballots, with the "leave" side posting a narrow victory over the "remain" side. The result signaled the beginning of negotiations to determine the terms under which the UK would leave the EU. This departure process was dubbed "Brexit," a combination of "Britain" and "exit."

Following the vote, UK and EU politicians engaged in complex, difficult, and contentious negotiations. The negotiating process began in March 2017, when UK prime minister Theresa May invoked Article 50 of the EU's Treaty of Lisbon. That article explains the procedures a country must follow if it decides to voluntarily rescind its membership in the EU and includes a two-year timeframe for establishing a withdrawal agreement. However, Brexit negotiations failed to produce such an agreement within the two-year window, forcing UK leaders to seek an extension. Even with an extension, May was unable to get Parliament to approve her withdrawal agreement, so she resigned in July 2019 and was replaced by Brexit champion Boris Johnson, who vowed to take the UK out of the EU with or without a withdrawal agreement. A deal was finally reached in January 2020, just days before the UK officially left the EU; subsequent negotiations led to a free trade agreement between the two parties signed in December 2020, which went into effect in 2021.

Background

The EU's precursor organization, the European Economic Community (EEC), was established in 1957 by a multilateral international agreement among founding states known as the Treaty of Rome. The UK was not among the EEC's original members and did not officially join until 1973. Opinion on the UK's participation in the EEC was divided from the very beginning among both politicians and the public. In 1975, the UK held a referendum to gauge public support for remaining in the EEC, which functioned at the time solely as a common market to facilitate international trade among members. UK citizens endorsed remaining in the EEC by a majority of about two-thirds, with 64.5 percent of eligible voters casting ballots.

Opposition to EEC membership persisted after the 1975 referendum and continued to periodically surface as a topic of political debate in the UK. In the lead-up to the UK's 1983 general election, the Labour Party campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the UK from the EEC but was defeated by the Conservative Party, headed by Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). In 1993, the EEC became the EU by virtue of the Treaty of Maastricht, which also established a requirement for members to maintain cooperative foreign, security, judicial, and domestic affairs policies. These new membership terms reopened the debate on the UK's status within the EU, but at the time, the British public displayed little appetite for another referendum on the matter.

However, by the early twenty-first century, a growing faction of UK citizens had become disenchanted with the EU, largely due to the close integration of immigration and economic policies among member states. In 2012, Conservative prime minister David Cameron pledged that he would call a referendum on the issue if he was reelected in the UK's 2015 general election. When voters returned him to office, Cameron kept his promise. The referendum was held on June 23, 2016, after months of campaigning by both the "leave" and "remain" sides. More than thirty million people cast ballots, representing 71.8 percent of eligible voters. In a close and surprising outcome, the "leave" side earned a slim majority over the "remain" side, by a margin of 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent.

Overview

Cameron, who had supported the "remain" side, resigned as UK prime minister after the 2016 referendum. He was replaced by May, a fellow Conservative and Cameron's home secretary, who was tasked with leading the UK through Brexit negotiations with the EU. In January 2017, May identified UK-EU trade, immigration, security, and labor rights for foreign EU nationals living in the UK as the four key issues that must be addressed by the withdrawal agreement. May officially invoked Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon on March 29, 2017, heralding the official start of the UK's secession process.

Political leaders representing the UK and the EU held their first round of talks in June 2017, producing an impasse. May later revealed that the two sides were struggling to agree on several issues, including the terms under which the UK would be able to access the EU trade bloc, offshore fishing rights, and the UK-EU border. May's government and the EU eventually reached an agreement in 2018, which was first published in November of that year. It met with immediate and widespread disdain in the UK, with the general public, May's political opponents, and some members of her own Conservative Party all panning it on the grounds that it left the UK subject to all the drawbacks of EU membership with none of the advantages. Several senior UK negotiators resigned in the wake of the failure.

Nevertheless, the proposed deal continued into the UK Parliament, where it was subject to a vote. In January 2019, Parliament resoundingly rejected the proposal by a count of 432 to 202, creating further uncertainty and turmoil. The two-year time limit for reaching a withdrawal agreement, which fell on March 29, 2019, passed without a settlement, following two more failed votes in Parliament. The EU agreed to extend the deadline until October 31, 2019. Many also called for a second Brexit referendum, a suggestion rejected by "leave" voters.

Brexit negotiations were also beset by internal divisions within the UK over the 2016 referendum's result. The UK consists of four member countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Only in England and Wales did a majority of voters endorsed leaving the EU, by margins of 53.4 percent and 52.5 percent, respectively. A majority of Scottish and Northern Irish voters chose to remain, leading some to speculate that the UK itself might fragment over the Brexit issue. Northern Ireland especially represented a difficult complication, because of its hybrid status as a member country of the UK that nonetheless retained strong cultural as well as political ties to the Republic of Ireland. The violent late twentieth-century conflict in Northern Ireland between unionists and nationalists, a period widely referred to as the Troubles, was only resolved with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which created a highly fluid border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. However, Brexit stood to make Northern Ireland the only land border between the UK and the EU, of which the Republic of Ireland would remain a member, raising the specter of establishing a hard border that would reignite old conflicts on the island of Ireland. Therefore, in November 2018, UK and EU negotiators agreed on a draft treaty that included an "Irish backstop," which involved the temporary use of a single customs territory in order to ensure a hard border would not be created between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The backstop would be enacted if the UK and EU could not reach an alternative agreement and last until both parties agreed it was no longer necessary. The deal was widely supported by parties in Northern Ireland, though Brexit supporters had no wish to remain in a customs union with the EU.

In July 2019, May stepped down after the repeated failure of her Brexit deal. In a Conservative Party vote, she was replaced by Boris Johnson, May's former foreign secretary, who announced he would not reopen negotiations on the withdrawal agreement until the EU removed the Irish backstop from the treaty, which the EU stated it would not do. Johnson, one of the most prominent supporters of the original "leave" campaign, vowed to take the UK out of the EU by the October 31 deadline whether Parliament approved a deal or not. He dismissed warnings that such a "no-deal Brexit" would have dire consequences for the British economy by throwing the UK's trade rules with the rest of Europe into chaos. However, his administration settled on a deal very similar to May's, but replacing the Irish backstop with special customs regulations that would enable the UK to create its own international trade agreements but imposed tariffs on certain goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Johnson also struggled to get his vision for Brexit approved by Parliament and was forced to pursue another extension of the deadline, which was set at January 31, 2020. Seeking to gain more parliamentary support, Johnson called a snap general election in December 2019. He led the Conservative Party to a landslide electoral victory in which it gained a substantial eighty-MP majority, widely seen as a mandate to complete Brexit. Soon after the election, Parliament gave preliminary approval the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, setting the stage for the rest of the Brexit process, including a transition period set to last through the end of 2020. On January 20, 2020, the bill was officially ratified by the UK, and the EU followed suit six days later. Therefore, the withdrawal agreement was in place when the UK officially left the EU on January 31.

After Brexit was complete, officials from the UK and EU continued to negotiate the relationship between the two entities through the transition period. The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was signed on December 30, 2020, and went into effect in May 2021 after being ratified by both sides. It provided a framework for free trade between the UK and EU. Other treaties were agreed to regarding nuclear energy cooperation and the exchange and protection of classified information.

Despite the ratification of the TCA, a number of issues continued to complicate the relationship between the EU and the UK, namely the issue of Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Protocol, which preserved an open land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland by mandating that inspections and document checks would be conducted between Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Northern Ireland, went into effect in 2021.

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