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With EU leaders due to discuss Brexit at a summit in Brussels on Thursday, the document lays out the most detailed German position yet for “future formal negotiations” about the U.K.’s relationship with Europe once it leaves the bloc in 2019, without opening the door to such talks yet.
The four-page document, dated Oct. 11, urges the EU avoid a piecemeal approach if and when talks with the U.K. get under way. It proposes instead a broad partnership that includes “at a minimum” the fields of foreign and security policy; fighting terrorism; cooperation on criminal justice; agriculture and fisheries; energy; transport, and especially air transport; research and digital issues.
“We share the U.K.’s desire to secure a close partnership with the Union after its exit that covers economic and trade relations,” the ministry states in the paper, which has been circulated to other German government departments but not approved by the Chancellery. [...]
“A verdict on whether any future exit accord should include transition rules can only be reached when the shape of future EU-U.K. relations has become clearer,” Merkel’s chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters on Friday. Germany is sticking to the sequencing of Brexit talks agreed by all other 27 EU members, and “adequate progress” on first-phase issues is still needed before talks can start on the new relationship, he said.
In its paper, the ministry recommends that the free-trade deal should be “balanced, ambitious and far-reaching,” with the degree of access to the EU’s single market conditional on the extent to which the U.K. is prepared to adhere to regulatory norms. Even where the U.K. agrees to common rules, there can be no “cherry-picking” that gives the U.K. a competitive advantage, it said.