CEPS: After the UK’s Brexit White Paper – What’s the next move towards a CFTA?

27 February 2017

Michael Emerson reflects on the possible next moves the UK might make to secure the Strategic Partnership May's Brexit White Paper explicitly asks for, and analyses a range of possible responses from the EU.

The Brexit White Paper marks a significant advance towards setting out how the UK will seek to negotiate a Comprehensive Free Trade Area (CFTA) with the EU. In seeking to secure “free, frictionless and seamless” trade relations in at least several chapters of a comprehensive agreement, this leads straight into the next question of how this objective might be specified in legal and operational terms. The EU for its part has experience with two quite different CFTAs, namely CETA with Canada and the DCFTA with Ukraine and others. While the British debate at home talks more about the Canadian CETA, this seems to reflect the opinions of people who have not looked at the content of the two cases. Of course, for British public opinion, Canada is ‘more like us’. CETA, however, is clearly not in the “frictionless and seamless” category of free trade arrangements. On the other hand, the DCFTA model has some specific features that could help reconcile the British objective of getting “free, frictionless and seamless” market access with some degree of flexibility for negotiation over its commitments for continuing compliance with EU market law. The EU’s likely response to these hypotheses of course is unknown at this stage, except that anything like “free, frictionless and seamless” market access will be subject to rigorous conditions. Finally, there is recent news that immigration from the EU into the UK has fallen drastically in the second half of 2016 since the referendum, which, if confirmed and possibly amplified, greatly eases the context for this very difficult issue. 

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