The UK's relationship with the EU is close to breaking point, and both sides could lose out if there is a split, writes Wyles for European Voice.
Five years ago it was different. Now, it is no longer exceptional to hear people in Brussels talk of ‘when' the United Kingdom pulls out of the European Union rather than ‘if'.
There is nothing to lighten the gloom for those who believe that both the UK and the EU will suffer grave damage from this looming political disaster, an exit stage-managed by anti-Europeans in the Conservative Party with the connivance of an opposition Labour Party that has begun to burn its pro-European credentials.
Most analysts see three options for the UK: staying in a two-tier Europe alongside a much more closely integrated eurozone; joining the European Economic Area to secure access to the single market but without influence over its regulation; or membership of the European Free-Trade Area alongside Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
There is a fourth option that receives little attention. It would be to attempt a re-negotiation that seeks not to reject EU membership or to shut the EU out of broad domains of life, but, rather, to rally partners behind a reform programme that responds to some of the UK's principal objections. Britain is not alone in worrying about the size and financing of the EU's budget and Common Agricultural Policy priorities, nor in its unease about the Union's bureaucratic unaccountability and centralising tendencies. Other Member States also have voters who would welcome reforms to counterbalance the enormous leap of integration proposed by a banking, fiscal and political union.
This option receives little attention perhaps because it seems too fanciful. Britain may already have lost the political goodwill of its partners that would be necessary to push forward a political agenda of this kind. It also lacks the coalition-building skills. A clean break would be easier and simpler. And then, after 20 or 30 years as a declining offshore power, to seek to come in from the cold with a request for admission into Europe's political and currency union.
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