I will miss you when you’re gone (or not): examining EU foreign policy negotiations pre- and post-Brexit

Following Brexit, several observers noted that, while the EU would be deprived a major foreign policy actor with significant capabilities, it would also lose a member state that had consistently objected against a more ambitious common foreign and security policy. To date, scholarly attention has focused on what Brexit means for the EU (and UK) foreign policy capacity, but few studies have specifically examined how Brexit might have altered negotiation practices, bargaining strategies and coalition-formation patterns in EU foreign policy negotiations. This paper sets out to fill this gap, by investigating to what extent the UK’s departure from the EU has influenced the ways in which member states negotiate over foreign and security policy. This contribution first engages in an exploratory network analysis of PSC coalition re-configurations before and after Brexit, thus providing a broad overview of the ways in which coalition-formation dynamics changed once the UK was no longer in the EU. Relying on an original set of elite interviews with EU officials and national diplomats, the paper then focuses on two distinct CFSP/CSDP negotiations, which took place before and immediately afterwards the Brexit referendum: the agreement on the sanction regime against Russia (March-July 2014) and the launch of the Permanent Structured Cooperation in December 2017. In so doing, the paper focuses on a negotiation where the UK played a significant role (Russian sanctions negotiation) and one where London no longer contributed to the decision-making process (PESCO). This paper offers a number of insights on the transformative effects of the UK’s departure from the EU. For one, it shows that the impact of the Brexit on EU foreign policy is very much issue-dependent. While the absence of the UK in the PESCO negotiations allowed to make significant inroads into greater cooperation in the area of security and defense, the expertise and brokering role of UK during the first sanction negotiations against Russia proved critical for a concerted response to the annexation of Crimea. While there is no shortage of member states that are willing to fill in the shoes of the UK in CFSP/CSDP negotiations and embrace what used to be British positions, the PESCO negotiations suggest that they might not always be able to throw their weight around the same way London used to.