The devil’s in those 1,722 pages of detail
Ileave it to others to speculate on whether, in Theresa May’s Downing Street outburst against Brussels she was “speaking for England”, or had gone off her head. But one leaked detail of her dinner the previous week with Jean-Claude Juncker and the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, is worth dwelling on.
To remind Mrs May of just what she and the EU are up against in the next 18 months, Juncker was said to have plonked on the table two documents, the EU’s trade deal with Canada and the EU’s accession treaty with Croatia in 2011.
Both are very relevant to our concerns, because Mrs May not only hopes to negotiate an unprecedented trade deal: at the end of the negotiations, there will also have to be a secession treaty, covering much of the same ground as an accession treaty, but in reverse.
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which gave Canada much less access to the European market than we enjoy now, is incredibly complex, covered 1,598 pages and took seven years to negotiate. The Croatia treaty, like any accession treaty, had to cover 35 “chapters” or policy areas, only six of which refer to trade; and was again extremely complex, filling 124 pages, which took six years to agree.
Juncker seemingly invited Mrs May to read these documents, because they each conveyed the awesome scale of the ground her negotiations will have to cover in just 18 months. At every stage, Mr Barnier’s team will have to refer back to each of the 27 countries he is representing, each of which will then have to ratify what is agreed, with the power of veto if they don’t like it.
Just leafing through those documents is a sobering corrective to any hubristic optimism about what we are taking on.