Press

Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform warns that France and Germany are increasingly operating unilaterally, each pursuing its national interest. “Germany,” he points out, “did not consult its EU partners over its support for the Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline, although it will increase the EU’s dependency on Russian energy and cause tensions with the US.”

Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, the EU policy special at the Centre for European Reform in Brussels says that the Commission’s ‘conditionality’ proposal will survive in some form - but it is not yet clear exactly what will remain, once the haggling over the budget heats up.“The risk is that ‘rule of law’ conditionality will become a bargaining chip in the negotiating end-game, traded away for other concessions rather than being treated on its merits,” she warned in a discussion paper last month.

Sophia Besch, a defence and security specialist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said Britain was still trying to figure out what global Britain meant. “Maybe the thinking was that there wasn’t a new high level message,” she said. “But in the debates on China and technology, a high-level UK voice would have been valuable.”

Sam Lowe, at the Centre for European Reform, says the case for establishing freeports is often much clearer in developing countries, where the environment for doing business may be more difficult, with higher tariffs and bigger bureaucratic obstacles. “You can see value in countries that have real rule of law and governance issues, an unwieldy business system, lots of patronage . . . You can make a much better argument for them in a developing context.”

Nor has Germany been prepared “to suffer economic pain for political and foreign-policy gains," said Christian Odendahl, a German economist with the Centre for European Reform in Berlin. “And this is now a Germany feeling economically insecure about its future.”

Sam Lowe, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, thinks the two sides will manage to agree a deal this year, but thinks it will, as with the divorce talks, go down to the wire.
"One of the constant threads throughout Brexit was everyone saying "we are happy with severe disruption", but no one really wants it when it approaches," he says.
"In the third quarter the UK will concede in certain areas and the EU will budge a little bit and then Boris Johnson will package it up as a win."
 

“This is another example of the UK needing to take a decision on whether it continues to take an EU approach or not in the knowledge that if it doesn’t there is the possibility of facing trade penalties,” said Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre for European Reform think tank.