Say hello to invisible Brexit
BRUSSELS — Britain is leaving the European Union this weekend with a whimper.
It took one referendum, two national elections, three prime ministers and four years of continentwide political anguish for the United Kingdom to achieve Brexit, but you will find little proof of it across Europe as Britain heads for the door Friday.
Brexit was not a topic of conversation among the business elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and it’s virtually taboo in Brussels, heart of the European Union. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is filling his political week with a debate over a controversial high-speed rail line and a battle with Washington over Huawei’s role in Britain’s mobile networks, ahead of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to London on Thursday.
And while Brexit may have spawned a thousand front pages and billions of Google searches, it’s been knocked off the global media agenda by events as disparate as Kobe Bryant’s death, President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and Australian wildfires.
In part that’s because not much changes at the stroke of midnight on Friday.
The world will wake up Saturday to scenes of jubilant Brexit voters wrapped in Union Jack flags and wearing Union Jack-patterned hats in the shadow of Big Ben. But there will be no fireworks, and not even a special “bonging” of Big Ben (closed for repairs). And when the hangover wears off, the sober reality will be a long transition period. It will take at least a year — and possibly up to a decade — to negotiate a detailed trade deal to manage the future EU-U.K. relationship.
With that in mind, most Britons don’t want to hear about Brexit anymore, even though they handed Boris Johnson a majority government in December to “get Brexit done.”
According to Scott Carn, a Briton who works in London and lives in Brussels, “Brits just want Brexit to go away. Even if they think it’s sh--, they just want something different to talk to about.”
In Brussels, most EU officials and lobbyists are treating Brexit day as a sad moment, but not something to dwell on. “By 2019, we were just fed up,” said one chief of staff in the EU’s executive arm.
“At first there was hope that [Brexit] might not happen,” the official added. “Then we asked what we could do to help manage it. Now it’s just ‘get it done.’”
Years of tortured negotiations between Brussels and London felt like “being dumped by your boyfriend cruelly and slowly,” according to another EU official involved in the talks. But now that the divorce papers are signed, Brexit feels like a nonevent. A chemical industry lobbyist described the week as an “anti-climax.”
For others, there’s a personal toll and private lament. As I played on the floor with the toddler of my Brussels hosts on Monday, his British mother — who met his Dutch father while working in Brussels — told me: “These kids would not exist without the European Union. We owe our family to Britain’s membership of the EU. It’s just sad to think of the families that will never be because of all this.”
Perhaps the strangest event all week will be a drinks reception held at the European Parliament on Wednesday for departing British members of Parliament. For Brexiteers, it will be the celebration of a lifetime’s work. For everyone else attending, it will be the political equivalent of a funeral.
Nothing changes for those working on the planned EU-U.K. trade deal: the same team will return to the same desks, under the same leadership of French negotiator Michel Barnier and Sabine Weyand, his former deputy who is now head of the EU trade department. Top of the list of issues to be negotiated: Fishing rights, EU-U.K. level playing field arrangements, trade and security protocol.
What EU officials fear most is that the U.K. will seek to turn itself into a low-tax, low-regulation competitor to the EU on its doorstep.
“A lot of people think they’re deregulating and that they’re saying, ‘F--- it, we don’t like your [economic] model,'” said an EU official who helps coordinate the European Commission’s negotiating position. The more the U.K. attempts to diverge from EU rules and standards, the longer that trade deal will take to negotiate.
Whatever the rhetoric from Downing Street, Brexit is inevitably the latest stage of Britain’s centurylong withdrawal from its empire and global leadership ambitions.
The U.K. may retreat further still. The Scottish government wants a second independence referendum, and the demographic tide is turning in Northern Ireland, which may yet reunite with the Republic of Ireland within a generation.
Unlike other historic British withdrawals that threw the rights of citizens and residents up into the air, there will be no grand ceremonies or scenes of violence to mark Brexit.
In Brussels, the official Brexit documents were signed at 2 a.m. Friday, and starting on Wednesday, British flags will be discreetly removed from EU buildings over the course of three days. The European Parliament’s Union Jack flag will be consigned to a nearby history museum.
Compare that to the 1947 partition process that created India and Pakistan. Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from the area displaced around 14 million people and left at least 200,000 dead. Britain’s efforts to leave Palestine and allow the birth of two countries, including the Jewish state of Israel, led to a war from 1947 to 1949.
When Britain left Hong Kong in 1997, there was no blood, but its residents were left in a suspended state of partial democracy. Today, they make the same demands to Chinese authorities for self-determination, and the same demands for British citizenship, that London turned down in the 1980s.
As a heartbroken EU fractures and Britain forges a new path, this time the pain will be felt in customs paperwork and passport checks rather than blood and bodies. For a union built on the promise of peace, that’s something to hold on to.
Ryan Heath is the author of Global Translations, a new POLITICO weekly newsletter. Sign up for the free newsletter.
